


You Were Never Meant to Feel Alone

by perfectpro



Series: Paradise Valley [1]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:20:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4825298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfectpro/pseuds/perfectpro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are two years, nine voicemails, and a lifetime of memories between them, but right now the foot of space separating their seats seems the most insurmountable. Because she knows she was wrong to not tell him, even more wrong to ignore him, and now she’s paying for it.</p><p>-</p><p>Or, the one where Lydia comes home and tries to make things right with the boy she left behind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Were Never Meant to Feel Alone

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from John Mayer's "On the Way Home", which I thought was more than appropriate.
> 
> This one has been in my mind for a while, and I fiddled with just the main content for a long time until I realized it was missing some key elements. I added those in, and it finally came together just like I'd been hoping.

Lydia had told Scott when her flight was landing, so she’s surprised to find Stiles waiting for her at the end of baggage claim, a hopeful attempt at a smile accompanying the sign he’s bearing with her name on it. There’s a reason that she’d asked Scott to pick her up from the airport, because she isn’t sure how far she’s going to be able to get through the three hour drive back to Beacon Hills with Stiles before she feels claustrophobic.

Putting on a good humored smile, she pulls her suitcase along behind her and gives him a little wave.

His expression shifts from hopeful to a mere grin, and it’s strange to think that a smile looks out of place on his features. It does, though, seems like he’s only trying to remember going through the motions. The happiness seems a little forced, but the relief is clearly evident as he sets the sign aside to pull her into his arms.

“Hi, Stiles,” she whispers, letting her body relax into his touch. It feels foreign for the first moment before she wraps her arms around him and kind of sinks into his chest, and then the memories come rushing back. They’ve been like this dozens of times, pressed together with rapidly beating hearts and only the presence of mind to be thankful they were each still alive. Excluding graduation and the day before she left, it’s probably the only time that they’ve held each other without questioning whether tomorrow was guaranteed.

When they separate, he takes her suitcase and gives her a once over so obvious that she’s glad she’s wearing the outfit she is, if only because he has an excuse to stare. “Hey, Lyds.” And then he lifts his eyes from her body and looks into her, and it’s a little too serious for her taste, especially with his soft smile. “I missed you.”

She can’t deal with that right now. “How was Berkley?” she asks, the idea of answering him too ridiculous to even consider for any serious length of time. His Facebook status updates have mentioned he’s gotten involved in research, and she knows from Twitter that he’s found a group of friends he goes out drinking with on the weekends. Proof of their drunken escapades is saved in her phone in the form of nine voicemails Stiles has left in varying stages of sobriety. She listens to them when she thinks about coming home.

His face falls, the soft smile dropping in an instant. “It was fine,” he tells her, sounding almost angry.

That leaves them in silence, which Stiles seems strangely comfortable in. He’s never been comfortable with silence before, and she feels like she has to talk to cover up the gaps in conversation. “So how’s Beacon Hills?” she asks, looking away from his searching eyes and readjusting her purse.

“It’s been two years since the last true shit show as I’m sure you remember, but not as calm as it used to be. My dad has enough to keep him busy, that’s for sure.” When she looks up at him expectantly, he asks, “How’s Boston?” He wants to ask _how was Boston for two years you never came back and I thought you weren’t ever going to_ so badly that he can taste it, but those words feel bitter and stale because he’s thought them so many times since she left. He manages to hold his tongue.

She meets his eyes, defiant. “Boston is fine. I needed the change of pace. No more planning my sleep schedule around life or death situations.” The joke falls flat, but she didn’t think it would help the mood much.

Apparently he pities her enough to fake a soft chuckle, and when they turn to walk away from the waiting area his hand brushes against hers softly, the most undemanding of invitations in that he doesn’t move it but also doesn’t move to do anything else.

It’s her who whips her arm away as though he’s burned her, and she keeps her back straight as she follows him out to the parking lot, where a blue Jeep sits in wait for them. “This still works?” Lydia can’t stop herself from saying it. The last time that she saw his Jeep was in her driveway that night, when it wouldn’t start and Stiles had to call Scott to come jump it. She’d watched quietly from her windowsill, knowing that she had cables in her car but unable to make herself go down the stairs and reveal she’d been awake.

That gets a genuine laugh out of him, something so unexpected that it startles both of them for a moment. “No, not the same Jeep. That one totally broke down in the middle of the road trip that Scott and I took before we went back to school last year. Derek had to come get us when we were in Kansas City if you believe it.”

“I believe it broke down; I don’t believe that Derek actually came to get you.” Even though Derek had come back before the end of the summer their senior year, looking tanned and almost relaxed with his sister, it’s still hard to picture him heading halfway across the country to pick up the two stranded boys.

He shrugs, opening the trunk and putting her suitcase in. “He was in Topeka for some reason, so it wasn’t far. Not like he road tripped out to us and then all of us road tripped back.”

After setting her laptop bag next to the suitcase, she shuts the trunk and closes her eyes, taking a moment to bask in the warmth of the California sun. It feels good to be back, to have her skin already heated after only a few moments outside. The Boston winter hadn’t lasted forever, but it had been so much worse than the winters she was used to in Beacon Hills. And while the last few months had been warmer, she had missed the dry heat that wicks sweat away before it has a chance to stick to her skin.

When she opens her eyes, Stiles is staring at her with an indecipherable expression. It almost makes her uneasy, how he doesn’t blink as he takes her in. She’s suddenly conscious of the way her bra strap has fallen from her shoulder and that her skirt has ridden up slightly with the walk to the car. Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, she breathes deeply and keeps her face neutral. “So, should we get going?”

Stiles blinks and nods, slowly, with control. “Yeah, probably best to beat rush hour.”

She doesn’t bring up how it’s eight o’clock at night and rush hour has just ended, just tugs her purse higher on the shoulder and brings her bra strap with it. The sooner they get back to Beacon Hills, the better.

-x-

_First saved message._

Her second week on campus, Lydia wakes up to find a voicemail that Stiles left the night before, at 11:30, just after she’d set her phone to silent and got into bed. Hesitantly, on her way to class she dials voicemail and punches in her passcode, waiting to hear him with a sick feeling in her stomach.

“Hey, Lyds, it’s, uh, Stiles. Just wondering how you’re settling in, figured that MIT is probably regretting letting you in because you’re giving everyone there an inferiority complex.” His voice sounds tinny through the speakers, unsure and the tiniest bit slurred. It’s as though he’s making the call after a few Sam Adams, but he doesn’t sound totally trashed. He continues, “I wanted to talk but… You’re busy, probably. It’s late, there. I forgot about the time change, shit. I’m sorry. Call me back.”

She’s reached the building her class is in, and Stiles is probably still asleep considering their different time zones and everything. Saving the message, she resolves that doing so will serve as a reminder to call him back. There’s a sense of relief that floods her as she puts that task off.

-x-

The interstate traffic isn’t bad, just the dregs of the busiest time of day left on the road. Stiles navigates the lanes easily, puts them in the HOV without any trouble and looks bored, flipping through radio channels as they go. He pauses at a smooth jazz station, barely listens to the chorus of a gospel hymn, and skips the station that plays rap entirely. After about five minutes of random rejected blips of music, he reaches across her and opens the glove box, taking out a wire and pushes it into her hands.

“I’ll handle the driving if you handle the music,” he says, eyes on the road.

She wants to make some quip about not just being able to handle the music, but everything that comes to mind seems sexual instead of defensive so she lets the moment pass. Instead, she takes out her phone turns it off of airplane mode. Notifications pour in at the opportunity, but she doesn’t pay attention, closing those tabs without looking at them and opening the array of music she has instead. From what she remembers about high school and the CDs that he kept in his Jeep then, Stiles likes shitty pop music and slow indie bands with a folk feel.

Putting on the latest top 40, she gauges his reaction and is pleased to find that his first reaction is to tap on the steering wheel in time with the beat. It’s so familiar that she feels like she’s back in senior year again, on the way to school as he goes over some crackpot theory with her.

But they’re not in high school. They haven’t been in high school for what seems like forever.

The moment of familiarity passes, and Lydia is left leaning against the headrest and wondering why she bothered to come back at all.

-x-

_Second saved message._

The next voicemail comes on a Friday night, a little after midnight when Lydia is at a frat party and can’t hear her ringtone over the music. She sees it when she’s walking back to her dorm with friends, and if she was sober she wouldn’t let the ‘Missed call from Stiles Stilinski’ notification affect her step, but instead she falters a little on her heels. It’s not quite a trip, because she catches herself, but one of her roommates notices it all the same.

She blames her misstep on the uneven sidewalk, locks her phone, and waits until she’s alone in her own room before she decides to listen, clutching the phone like a lifeline.

“Lyds, hey. Hope you’re doing good… Just calling to see you. See how you are.” His breathing comes out as shuddering noises that should be hard to hear above the background, but she doesn’t have any trouble picking it out. He sounds about as drunk as she is. “Yeah. Talk to you later.”

Falling back on her bed, she goes to press the button for ‘delete’ and ends up saving it instead. It’s too much work to go back into the archives and deleting it from there, so she ends the call instead. A small notification comes up, an option to call Stiles back. Her finger hovers over the message, uncertain as ever, before she moves her phone to the nightstand and wills herself to sleep.

In the morning, after listening to it again, her fingers shake too badly to delete it. It isn’t until she’s midway through the day that she realizes Stiles was sounding that drunk when it was barely even nine o’clock his time.

-x-

It’s a three hour drive to Beacon Hills from the airport, and by the thirty minute mark Lydia is tired of Stiles being comfortable with them not saying anything. They haven’t yet exhausted her pop playlist, but it only has an hour left before she has to go to a recommended radio station or download an hour or two of indie songs.

She has to talk, if only because the fact that he’s not makes her feel like her skin shrunk in the wash.

“How’s your dad?” It seems like a safe topic, far enough away from the pack that it shouldn’t spark any conversation too personal but close enough to regular conversation that Stiles might even be tempted to talk for more than a sentence or two.

He lifts the corner of his mouth, but it’s not really a smile. Just the semblance of one, as though he’s only doing it out of common courtesy. “He’s good. Using the law to bring down the big bads, which seems to be more effective now that he doesn’t have his son lying to him.” He reaches over and pulls a pair of sunglasses from the cup holder, shrugging as he does so.

She’d almost forgotten about the rift that formed between the father and son in the aftermath of the supernatural reveal. The sheriff had never been thrilled that Stiles wanted the law involved as little as possible, which had led to Stiles avoiding telling his father about the things they dealt with. It’s impressive that they’re still talking, considering the fact that Lydia doesn’t talk to her father and the only thing she’s ever blatantly lied to him about was saying that Jackson had never spent the night.

Bristling, she wonders what she’s supposed to say to him. Trying to support him seems too awkward, because she’s years too late to take the guilt that he’s built up since high school. Disregarding him is offensive and untrue, because Stiles kept his father out of their messes for good reasons. Those reasons usually involved claws and dead bodies, but they were good reasons nonetheless. “I’m glad he’s making a difference.”

That actually gets a smile out of him, brushing away the strange mechanical look he seems to sport out of habit. “Yeah, he is.” He sounds proud and reflective, as though he hadn’t quite realized how important his father’s work was before now.

-x-

_Third saved message._

Her phone goes off in the middle of a study session, and Lydia doesn’t even bother to check who is calling before she sends them to voicemail, apologizing profusely the TA. He just nods and smiles at her before redirecting everyone’s attention to their last problem set, asking them to solve the problem in as many ways as possible.

When the session has finished and she’s out of the classroom, the call has long since been forgotten. She picks up her phone to text her mom and say how her day has been going when the alert pops up on her lock screen, accompanied by Stiles’s profile picture from Facebook. The photo is of him grinning obnoxiously with Scott, his mouth split so wide that his eyes are squinting.

She hasn’t seen Stiles since she left four months ago, the last time they made eye contact at a pack meeting where she went to say goodbye. The last time she actually saw him was through her window that night, as he stared at her front door before turning to go. And even though it isn’t actually Stiles looking at her through the photo he has for his icon, the pseudo eye contact unnerves her enough that she resolves to listen to the voicemail a later date.

That date turns out to be the following day, when she’s bored at the quad and waiting for a friend. She’s curious, and it leads to her sitting back and waiting for his words. The fact that her breath is involuntarily being held isn’t something that she should notice, but the second she does she makes an effort to breathe normally.

“Hey. Wondering what you were up to. If you could start picking up my calls, that’d be great. I’m starting to wonder if you’re ignoring me on purpose.” Stiles sounds far away, confused. He sounds like there are thing he’d rather be doing than chatting up her voicemail. “Whatever, I know you’re probably busy. Anyway, this is Stiles, but you probably knew that by now. Talk to you later.”

The possibility of calling him back is too tempting, so she saves the message for later and tries not to think about the fact that she has three saved voicemails she hasn’t gotten around to responding to. All from the boy she thought she left behind.

-x-

“I thought Scott was going to pick me up,” Lydia mentions, digging a granola bar out of her purse and unwrapping it, careful to not get any crumbs on the Jeep’s interior. Not that Stiles would mind or notice, but it’s the principle of the thing. She missed dinner, and pretzels served on the airline aren’t meant to sustain through a full meal.

His eyes shift over to her slowly, almost calculating. “Like I said, he had something come up. Nothing bad, a veterinary emergency instead of a supernatural one. Hard to believe that our lives have calmed down that much, huh?” He sounds like it’s not truly believable, like there’s something coming for them because there has to be. That’s the way their lives work.

She’s the same way, most of the time. Always on edge, forever waiting for the other shoe to drop. There were days in Boston where she would walk to the nearest cemetery and let the voices run rampant in her mind, feelings her own thoughts fade away until the dead dominated. She would leave hours later, head pounding but feeling better all the same for it. Her friends had thought it the strangest thing they’d ever heard, that she studies in graveyards.

When she looks up at him, he’s still waiting on her answer. And she doesn’t remember him mentioning it earlier, but it’s entirely possible. “Hard to believe,” she whispers, head pounding more and more with every passing mile. She’s reminded of the red strings that had filled Stiles’s bedroom the last time she saw it, linking seemingly unrelated events. His words from years ago echo in her head. Red means unsolved.

There are plenty of things she left unsolved in Beacon Hills. And even though Lydia knows that Stiles is going to drop her off at her house, she wants to ask if they can go to the cemetery beforehand. She needs to see if she can reach out and listen to Allison. Now she has a better grip on her powers, now that she’s able to focus without causing herself so much pain. Maybe she’s not skilled enough to be teaching classes, but she’s been getting places.

Stiles would probably find the thought morbid. They’ve buried too many, watched too many bodies lowered into the ground. Other people their age would find it disturbing that Lydia can feel more at home in a graveyard than in her own apartment, but she’s used to it. And maybe Stiles would understand, but that would bother her almost more than if he was upset by it. Because she doesn’t want to admit that they’ve changed.

From the bottom of her heart, she’s always going to wish that Scott had never been attacked in the woods. She’s always going to wish things had never changed. And if that makes her a bad person, so be it.

Ignoring the thought of visiting her best friend, she closes her eyes and, in a moment of bravery and recklessness, reaches over and places her hand over Stiles’s on the gearshift. If he tenses up before relaxing, neither of them mention it, and she doesn’t dare look over to him again. Hopefully, he knows that she needs this, she needs the physical contact to keep from asking him to turn around and take her back.

While he doesn’t fully relax, Stiles doesn’t move away. Which, okay, she understands that. And she probably deserves it, so she takes back her hand when they get inside the Beacon Hills city limits. Settling instead for digging crescent shaped grooves into the seat with her nails, Lydia sets her jaw with determination.

She’s going to do this, whether she likes it or not. She needs to.

Pulling up to her empty house, it feels strange to see it again after such a long time. Her mother is away for the weekend but will be back during the week, only to leave again on the weekend that her flight back to Boston leaves. Lydia’s not hurt that her mother is going to be gone, because she and her mom see each other often enough. This visit is about getting to see the pack again. “Thanks for driving me,” she says, picking up her purse.

“Anytime,” Stiles says, disconnecting the aux cord and putting it away in the sunglasses storage bin. Pausing, he goes on, “Why did you leave?”

She hadn’t expected him to be so explicit, especially since she’s only just gotten into town. Granted, they’ve spent the last three hours dancing around the subject, but she finds herself frustrated instead of relieved that he’s brought the topic up. “Well, it was either me going to Boston or MIT relocating the campus. Turns out my leaving was a little more cost-effective.”

Looking over at her, he tells her, “You know what I mean.” His voice is the flattest she’s ever heard it.

And she does, of course she does, but she doesn’t want to have this conversation now. Not in her driveway while she still smells like airplane and hasn’t had a chance to brush her hair. Not with him looking at her like she has the answers to the universe and she’s keeping them from him. Not with her heartbeat picking up at the severity of his tone, because something in her says that it’s all come down to this. And Lydia’s had too many moments like this before, especially with him, and if there’s one thing she’s good at it’s ignoring things that need to be talked about.

“I loved you, and you left.” It’s a confession and an accusation all at once, and either way it feels too honest.

Excuses that she’s thought to herself for years come to mind, because she’s had this conversation with herself too many times to let him best her at it. “You knew I was leaving. I had to go; I couldn’t stay here any longer.”

“You could have gone somewhere closer to home!” Stiles shouts, exasperated.

That’s unfair of him to ask that of her. “I was accepted to MIT. I wasn’t going to give up my dream just because of some boy.” And maybe she’s being cruel, saying that he’s just ‘some boy’ when he’s so much more, but she can’t let herself think of what would have happened if she’d stayed. Boston has been good for her, better than staying in California ever could have been. She made herself a promise, and she’s going to keep it.

He bites his lip and resists saying the first thing that comes to mind. He feels useless, absolutely useless, because he thought this would help. Seeing her, talking with her, he thought that would make a difference. Instead of feeling better, he feels so much worse. As though there’s nothing left to say, he repeats in a hopeless, haunted voice, “I loved you, and you left.”

Lydia’s hand stills on the door handle and she forces her lips into a line. It’s been two years, she can handle herself better. She doesn’t need to say what she wants, because it can only make things worse. In all the instances of this conversation that she’s imagined, it always ends terribly when she tells the truth. And yet, despite telling herself this, she finds herself opening her mouth anyway. “I loved you, so I had to leave.”

The tension that’s been building in the Jeep comes to fruition in that moment. Stiles stops breathing, unable to make himself process her latest words. Then, finally, slowly, deliberately, he says, “You didn’t, I know you didn’t. You didn’t love me.” He’s clearly trying to keep his voice under control, but his anger is obvious all the same.

Staring straight ahead, she snaps, “You don’t know what I did or didn’t do. But I’m telling you that I did love you.”

Again, the note of anger he’s trying to keep hidden makes itself heard all the same. “You don’t get to sit here and say that to me. Not after two years of acting like I didn’t exist.” His words are said forcefully, intensity vibrating through him and making itself clear in the clench of his hands on the steering wheel.

There are two years, nine voicemails, and a lifetime of memories between them, but right now the foot of space separating their seats seems the most insurmountable. Because she knows she was wrong to not tell him, even more wrong to ignore him, and now she’s paying for it. She swallows and looks over him, sees how he’s not letting himself look anywhere near her.

“Get out.” This time, he doesn’t even make an attempt to hide the fact that he’s furious. It’s plain from the way that he leans forward and tenses his jaw, like he’s just barely keeping his composure. The action isn’t like Stiles, who gets frustrated easily but takes a lot to anger, but Lydia supposes that she needs to remember how much has changed between them. “I thought this was going to be different,” he mumbles, voice low.

She doesn’t know what else he could have expected. They haven’t spoken for two years, did he expect her to come sprinting through baggage claim to hug him? They aren’t lovers reuniting after a time apart, each day more agonizing than the last. They aren’t lovers, they’ve never been. And while she might have wanted it at one point, she’d left California with a promise to herself that she was better than some high school boy with dreams.

It had seemed like a lie even when she’d first come up with it, but she’d kept her word.

It’s with that that she opens the car door and waits patiently for him to pop the trunk before collecting her bags and walking to her front door. When she looks over before putting her key in the lock, Stiles is still not looking anywhere near her. Instead, he’s staring at her garage and swallows before putting the Jeep into reverse.

She’ll need to make sure that Scott is still the one who’s going to give her a ride to the airport when she does leave. Another car ride with Stiles can only lead to disaster.

-x-

_Fourth saved message._

Stiles doesn’t call for the next three months, and Lydia tells herself that it’s a good thing. Tells herself that it’s the best thing, really, because he’s at Berkley and she’s at MIT and the three thousand miles between them aren’t just going to disappear. Even if she does entertain the thought of going home for her fall break, surprising him at his dorm and forcing him to show her around the campus and introduce her to his friends.

She tosses the idea around with one of her roommates, who comments that she wishes she had a boyfriend to visit on the breaks. Lydia can’t stop herself when she snaps that she’s not dating Stile. After that, she drops the idea as though it burned her. Clears the flight search from her history, stops eying the summer clothing she hasn’t had a chance to wear in months, the whole nine yards.

And the week after, she wakes up on a Thursday morning to find a missed call from 4:17 am, 1:17 am California time, accompanied by a voicemail. Stiles sounds drunk before he even starts talking, which is an achievement.

“Lyds, hey. Today has been shit, such shit. Absolutely the worst, like, ever. Not as bad as when random people were dying around us, wow, that was terrible, but, like, normal-bad. We had a really fucked up high school experience, do you ever think about that?” He pauses, almost as though he’s really thinking back and remembering all of the shit they went through. “Really fucked up, yeah, oh my God. But today, really, today, has been bad. I fell asleep on the bus on the way home, and so I missed my meeting with my advisor.”

Then there’s the sound of a scuffle that comes over the line, mumbles voices and a slight argument that Lydia can’t figure out the cause of. People sound angry, and while she can occasionally pick out Stiles’s voice for the most part it’s just a jumble that doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense, really, even when he gets back and says, “God, sorry, my friends are dicks. But they’re dicks who took me out because I had a bad day, so maybe they’re not all bad. Maybe they’re not all bad,” he repeats, the words sounding strange and disfigured for a moment. “We’re out, yeah, and I wanted to tell you…” His voice drifts off.

Silence is all that she can hear for the next few seconds, but it can’t be over. She hasn’t heard the _Message over_ thing played in that mechanized voice she hates so much. Silence, but then Stiles takes in a ragged breath, and says once again, “I wanted to tell you that I don’t want to do this. God, I don’t want to do this.”

“Stiles, damn it,” a new voice says distantly, feminine and unrecognizable. And then fumbling before the voice comes on again, this time sounding much closer to the speaker. “I’m so sorry about this, he’s really drunk and he’s had a rough day. Again, so sorry,” she chirps, and Lydia has just enough time to run through the worst scenarios she can think of before the line goes dead.

She has half of a mind to call Stiles back and demand to know who that was, who took the phone from him and made his excuses. He’s listed as single on Facebook, and even if that isn’t the most reliable source, she’s certain that Scott would have mentioned something about it. Fury bleeds through her veins for an unknown reason, and she saves the message because doing anything else seems like too drastic of a measure.

-x-

Everyone is in town, so Scott decides to rally the pack for breakfast the next morning. That means Lydia finds herself awake at eight thirty in the morning, sitting behind the wheel of her car with eyes closed as she prays for strength. She doesn’t know what she’s going to need the strength for, but if Stiles is still mad at her she’s going to be in for an uncomfortable morning. Not to mention seeing everyone again.

With her key in the ignition, she finally starts the car and gets on the road. Last night, as Stiles drove her home, it hadn’t seemed so strange to be back. The storefront lights had all been dimmed, and excluding what was illuminated by the streetlamps and the headlights it had been too dark to see much of anything.

Now, driving down the streets she grew up on, the unfamiliarity of it all comes creeping up on her. She should have come home sooner, she knows. But every time she’d gathered the courage to buy an airplane ticket, the three thousand miles between Boston and California had seemed insurmountable, not a flight away. She would remember Allison’s grave, which she only saw twice, and the shift in Scott’s voice when she asked how everyone was. Most of all, she would remember Stiles’s blank face on her driveway the night before she left.

Being home is good for her, but that doesn’t mean that she has to like it.

The diner is crowded, but it’s exactly the way that she remembers it. Down to the chipped coffee mugs and the air slightly clouded with powdered sugar, nothing has changed. The tablecloths haven’t even been updated, the frayed gingham still covering the counters built into the wall. The pack hasn’t even moved their favorite table, huddled together in the corner like they’ve never left.

The sight makes her crack a smile as she tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and meets the eyes in front of her. It seems like everyone has come out to welcome her back. Malia, Liam, Scott, Kira, Cora, Derek, Danny, and Isaac are all smiling at her so brightly that it’s almost painful to look at. Stiles, sandwiched between Liam and Scott, bears an expression that is completely unreadable to her.

“Lydia,” Scott yells, joined quickly by Isaac, Kira, and Liam.

Unbidden, tears prick at the back of her eyelids. She’s not going to let that stop her, though, so she smiles a little wider and flings her arms open. Isaac is the first one to get to her, but only because he’s on the edge of the booth. Everyone else files out after that, quick to envelope her in a hug. Stiles is last, reluctant but resigned in his approach.

“I’m so glad you’re home,” Kira says, sounding as though she couldn’t be happier to see her again.

“I’m glad to be home,” Lydia answers, wishing that the words felt more natural. Everyone is so close to her. She just needs a little space, a little more room to breathe without feeling that everyone is watching her.

Feeling eyes on her used to be the most relaxing of experiences in high school, because she expected it and enjoyed it. Now that she’s had time to figure out how to blend into the background, though, it’s uncomfortable and cloying, a little too close for comfort.

She pulls away from the group after a few moments, until she’s been hugged for the minimum amount of the required for social acceptance. “Well, how have you all been?” she asks, smiling so hard that it hurts. Someone’s going to call her bluff, because she’s around werewolves who can smell emotion of course they’ll be able to figure out she’s uncomfortable. 

No one seems to notice, though, and she can’t tell whether she’s disappointed or not.

-x-

_Fifth saved message._

A few days after the mysterious girl took over Stiles’s phone call, Lydia looks down to see her phone lighting up with Stiles’s face on it. She’s in lecture, a computer science class that she’s two weeks ahead in the homework, but her phone is on silent and so she sits and watches the screen until it changes to ‘one missed call.’

A minute later, another notification pops up. ‘One new voicemail’ reads plainly, and she shouldn’t feel as intimidated as she does by those three simple words.

It’s because of the intimidation she felt that she listens to it as soon as she’s out of class. Just to show her voicemail that she’s the boss, and she’s not going to sit around and be afraid of whatever Stiles Stilinski has to say to her. So she walks outside and dials her voicemail, mouth set into a line as she waves a friend ahead, mouthing ‘I’ll catch up’ as she does so. And she leans against the scratchy brick of the computer science building and waits.

Stiles seems to have started speaking as soon as he voicemail answered, because he’s in the middle of the sentence when the speaker starts to pick him up. “…Never again, I swear. I don’t even know why I did that, it was so dumb. Don’t worry, I won’t call again. You don’t want to talk to me anyway.”

And then the message ends as suddenly as it began, Stiles hanging up abruptly. No mention of the girl who took over the phone at the end of his last call, no sign of wondering about how she’s doing or what she’s been up to. Just stops, and Lydia doesn’t know what to do, so she presses save. Maybe she’ll return the call once she feels ready to think about it.

-x-

The sun is high in the sky, bright and warm, on the day that Lydia actually does visit Allison’s grave. And while voices fill her head before she’s even close to the gates, Allison’s isn’t one of them. That doesn’t matter, though, because Allison has been dead for years. Some voices fade with time, Lydia’s discovered.

There are rules to the afterlife, even if she hasn’t been able to pinpoint them. There’s no real way to make the voices go away, because at first she assumed it would the type of thing where she would try to put the issues of the dead to rest before they could truly move on. That led to her unfortunate practice of staying out in shady areas of Boston late at night, and none of the voices ever left for a discernable reason. Sometimes they disappear and come back, some of them never come back. She’s still working on figuring it all out.

Her heels stick in the ground because it rained yesterday, but the area where Allison is buried is shielded by trees, and her headstone is dry. The last time Lydia had enough courage to stand in front of it, the earth had been fresh and she had been stupid enough to think about trying her hand at a resurrection spell.

She had been desperate and grief-crazed, so she’d stolen books from Deaton and had poured over them for weeks. In the end, she’d cried and drawn ruins in the dirt with blood. Her own blood, taken from under the light of a full moon. Something about sadness, about innocence and emptiness, and she’d sobbed out chants in archaic Latin. And when it had been over, nothing had happened. Nothing except for the fact that Lydia was left with the belief that they had all been better off before the introduction of the supernatural world.

She’d called Stiles that night, asked him to pick her up. And he’d known instantly what she must have been trying for, but he hadn’t asked any questions, hadn’t said anything, had just helped her into the Jeep and taken her home without a word. She reasons that, during that time, he’d probably still been blaming himself. For the Nogitsune’s actions. She’d probably been blaming him a little bit, too.

This time, the earth at the grave isn’t fresh. There’s no blood speckling the ground, but the headstone still looks like new, as though someone has been taking care of it even after all this time. There are even flowers that have only just started to wilt, a few daffodils bunched together with irises. With an unsteady hand, she sets down the fresh lilies she’d brought next to them.

“Long time no see.” Her voice is shaking, as are her knees. It can’t be normal to talk to someone’s grave.

With that, she sinks down on the ground and sits against the headstone, running her fingers along the grooves that spell out Allison’s name. She sits and closes her eyes, and every breath hurts more than the last.

It’s been an hour, or maybe two, when the sound of snapping twigs signals the approach of another person. Lydia turns around, fully expecting to find Chris Argent and instead ends up looking to see Scott McCall staring back at her with a sad smile. In his hands is a fresh bouquet of flowers to replace the wilting ones.

Lydia came back because she hasn’t visited the grave in years. Seeing Scott come back sends a stab of pain through her, because she knows he’s never stopped visiting. Setting her face to mirror the smile on his, she moves over to make room for him against the headstone. And maybe it’s sad, the fact that’s she can’t even make herself feel surprised, but something tells her this is the way it was meant to be.

“Didn’t think I’d find you here,” Scott tells her, moving the other flowers out of the way as he sits down with her.

Heart aching, she gives him a grim smile and looks pointedly at the wilted daffodils and irises that he’s come to replace. “Didn’t think you’d still be keeping the place up.”  
He stretches his legs out and puts the new bouquet on his lap. “I can’t come that often when I’m at school, so I try to make more it in the summer. She liked the summer best.” He sounds like he’s remembering, not reminiscing. It’s a fine line, but it makes all the difference, and maybe Scott has a healthier attitude about death than Lydia does, but she figures hers can probably be attributed to the fact that she hears voices regularly.

Pushing the thought away, she thinks back to Allison and the summer after their sophomore year. Before she’d gone to France, they’d laid out by the Martin’s pool for hours on end, trading stories as easily as if they’d known each other for years as the sun warmed their skin. She feels sad just thinking about it.

It’s still hard to breathe, but Scott takes her hand and seems to take a little of the pain with it, even though she doesn’t see his veins go black. “You don’t date.” It’s not a question, because she knows he doesn’t. Scott is the one member the pack that Lydia has completely kept up with, and she’s stayed involved enough to know that he hasn’t dated anyone since Kira. After their breakup, he’d shied away from romantic relationships completely.

“No,” he says, squeezing her hand lightly. “I can’t seem to make myself believe it would work out if I did.”

Of everyone she knows, Scott is the only one that she believes deserves a happy ending. The fact that he doesn’t agree makes her want to crawl down into the dirt with Allison and sleep forever. Not that she would, but… The trip home has taken more out of her than she thought it would. She hasn’t been sleeping well, and all of the arguing certainly hasn’t helped. Not to mention the fact that Stiles stares at her like she’s a puzzle that’s nearly done and he just needs to find the missing piece. It’s all a little too much.

The sharp groove of the first ‘A’ is digging into her back, and she adjusts herself with a wince. Cliché words come to mind, but nothing feels right. It occurs to her to say that Allison would have wanted him to be happy, but she’s not sure. Allison wasn’t even-tempered by any means, prone to jealousy like anyone else. Seeing him with Kira drove Allison crazy, and Lydia wasn’t sure what Allison would have wanted for Scott if she herself wasn’t an option.

“I miss her.” The confession feels heavier than it should, but the last time she let herself really feel the effects of Allison’s death she’d ended up standing helplessly in the graveyard with blood in her hands, Latin words in her throat, and tears on her cheeks. All in all, this encounter seems to be going better than that one did.

He squeezes her hand again, not looking over at her. “I miss her, too. She was mine. She was my everything.” He sounds choked up with the realization, weighted down with the sheer truth of that statement.

There are many things that Lydia has come to accept in the world. The most infuriating of those is that she’s assumed to be dumb based off of her looks. She doesn’t like it, and she tries to change it, but she’s had to accept it in order to fight it. It’s not the only one, though, because she’s also accepted that she’s never going to stop hearing the dead. She’s never going to be free of the supernatural world.

Lydia has accepted that her best friend is dead, but that doesn’t mean she’s about to accept that Scott McCall gets to lay claim to everything that Allison was. Voice sharp, she responds, “She wasn’t just yours. She was mine, too.” People always forget that Scott wasn’t the only one who loved Allison, and she’s tired of it. She’s tired of people trying to erase her best friend, partly because Allison would never have stood for it and partly because she’s vain enough to want to be remembered.

Tipping his head back to rest against the headstone, he nods.

They sit in silence for a few minutes until Scott tugs her up, and then he arranges her lilies with the rest of his flowers. Picking up the old bunch with the hand that isn’t holding hers, he then touches the headstone reverently for a moment, closing his eyes as he does so. It’s a gesture so intimate that Lydia finds herself looking away.

“Your mom is still gone, right?” he asks, turning away from the grave at last.

“She thought she’d be back tonight, but something came up. I’m on my own for the week,” she says, glancing over her shoulder to read Allison’s name one last time. Beloved daughter and friend doesn’t cover it, she thinks.

Scott nods, running his thumb across her knuckles absentmindedly. “You should stay with my mom and I. I don’t want you to be alone.”

The reason why she’d chosen to keep up with Scott above anyone else is that he genuinely cares. He may not always like her choices, but he wants her to be alright and he knows that she takes care of herself. And he’s always been that way, has even stayed that way while she avoided contact with Stiles and still sought him out. He doesn’t agree with her most of the time, but he supports her all the same.

If she spends one more night in her empty childhood home, she’s going to go crazy. She doesn’t know how Scott knows that, but she can’t help but be thankful for the offer. “I’d like that,” she confesses, wishing that she didn’t actually want to.

He smiles at her, soft and thankful. “We can pick up your stuff later,” he says, seemingly at ease from her answer.

As they leave the cemetery, Lydia lets herself be thankful for the fact that Scott showed up. Seeing Allison alone had been a terrible idea. So she sighs and walks along with him, hand clasped tightly in his as she tries to keep her tears at bay.

-x-

_Sixth saved message._

The summer of her freshman year is nearing, and Lydia is excited. She has an internship lined up, and it’s located close enough to campus that she can go ahead and sign the lease on the apartment she’s been eying with her mother for the upcoming year. The building is gorgeous and looks like everything she’s ever wanted, granite countertops and a claw foot bathtub. Granted, she hasn’t seen a claw foot bathtub in forever, and maybe that’s a sign that the plumbing needs to be updated, but whatever. These things work themselves out.

It’s the week before her finals week, and most of the schools in California are letting out either this Friday or next. Scott is already home free, so ecstatic to have free time that he calls her often enough to where she starts putting her phone on silent while she studies. Which is all the time, this week, because if she doesn’t keep her 4.0 she’s going to rip someone’s throat out. It would feel therapeutic.

Because of the fact that the frequency of Scott’s calls have picked up, she isn’t suspicious of the three missed calls notification, but the notification for three voicemails confuses her a little. Scott usually doesn’t leave voicemails, and she can’t think of something important that might have prompted him to leave one in the last eight hours that have passed since they last spoke, when he called her while he was in line for ice cream and wanted to know if she thought mint chocolate chip or something called Chunky Funky Monkey sounded better to her.

She went with mint chocolate chip, obviously. She doesn’t know what Chunky Funky Monkey is, and she isn’t entirely sure that she’d like to.

Nevertheless, she dials voicemail and waits patiently for Scott’s voice to come on the line. She’s prepared to listen to him ask her a series of questions that don’t pertain to anything obvious, and then the second message will be him sheepishly saying that she can disregard the first message because he figured it out. The third message, it makes her almost start laughing to think that he left a third message, will be him saying to disregard the second message, it turns out that he needs those answers after all.

Sure enough, Scott is there for the first message. “Okay, Scott here, so for some reason flights to Boston are ridiculously cheap next month, and I mean ridiculously cheap to the point where I, a lowly intern in a vet office who barely worked part time this semester, am able to afford it. And you’re always telling me that I should come around and see the city. Prepare yourself, Lydia Martin, to give me the grand tour. Shit, Stiles could come with us! That would be so sweet, all of us in the city. Just let me know what dates would be good.”

She deletes it without thinking, because there aren’t any questions there that she’ll need to listen to again after the other two. Scott is coming to Boston next month, which is exciting. She hasn’t seen him in far too long. Stiles might be coming, too, which is problematic. She hasn’t been away from Stiles for nearly long enough. Pressing the next button, she tries to prepare herself what’s next. Which is Stiles’s voice, apparently. She’s not prepared.

“So Scott just called me and tried to convince me to come to Boston with him next month to see you. I figured you probably haven’t mentioned the fact that we no longer speak since he felt it was appropriate to invite me. I didn’t tell him, by the way. That we don’t talk. Or, better, you don’t talk. I seem to feel fine talking to you, but whatever. I made up some excuse, so don’t worry. I won’t be coming up with him.”

And Lydia isn’t quite sure how much of that information is needed, but a good bit of it sounds like she should give the contents of that message some serious thought when she has the time. She saves it, sending it into the abyss that is becoming her archived messages. Before she started saving Stiles messages because she didn’t know what else to do.

Scott takes over the third message, sounding only slightly less cheerful than he did when he left the first. “Stiles can’t come, bummer, he said that he’s probably going to be doing research and wouldn’t be able to get time off. Looks like it’s just you and me, so text me what dates you’re free.”

Closing her eyes, she deletes that message and hangs up. Crisis averted, for the time being. She opens up her calendar app and tries to figure out when it would be most convenient for Scott to be here.

-x-

Derek is the one who brings up going to amusement park, much to everyone’s surprise. Even Cora teases him about it, calling him a softy and ‘beyond huggable.’ Then he lets he drop, and with them so does the conversation.

That’s how the idea comes about, though, because everyone is at Malia’s and Kira’s apartment, lounging around and trying to put off the inevitable boredom by having conversations that have been drawn out for far too long. Lydia appreciates it, that they’re trying to keep her entertained, but just because absence makes the heart grow fonder doesn’t mean that she magically created memories of Beacon Hills being lively.

By any stretch of the imagination, it’s a fairly boring town. Excluding the random supernatural phenomena, of course, but those are outliers on a slope that’s practically a flat line. Nothing interesting has been going on while she’s been in town, though, even when the fact that they live on a Hell Mouth is accounted for.

“I’m bored,” Isaac whines, resting upside down on the back of the couch.

Malia rests her feet on his chest, which is on the cushion, and scoffs, “So do something.”

Which is easier said than done, considering that it’s nine o’clock on a Tuesday night and most everything around them will be closed by ten. Doing something this late is basically impossible. Especially when everyone takes the time to remember that the only clubs nearby, Sinema and The Jungle were closed down recently for creating chimeras out of teenagers and for serving alcohol to minors, respectively.

“I want to watch a movie,” Kira declares, leaning her back against the coffee table. Stretched out against the furniture, she looks comfortable enough to fall asleep, head lolling back occasionally.

Danny, his laptop in front of him, flicks a few buttons on his keyboard before pulling up what looks to Lydia like an entire movie database. “What genre do we want?” he asks, kicking Kira gently in the side to get her attention.

Lydia could not care less what they watch. She wants to go to sleep. She wants to go home, really. Not ‘home’ as in the house on the outskirts of town that’s sitting empty, and not as in the guest bedroom at the McCalls she used last night, but ‘home’ as in her apartment in Boston. The one with high ceilings and hardwood floors and fixed rent. The one that she was asked to leave for a week so that they could work on the plumbing, leading her to foolishly listen to her unheard voicemail before clicking the ‘Purchase Flight’ button on Delta’s website with determination and a blood alcohol content over the legal limit. “Horror,” she says, for the hell of it, because horror movies relax her in a way that’s almost meditative.

After she’s been strapped onto a table and had someone almost drill into her head, seeing CGI ghosts and demons onscreen doesn’t really scare her. Not when her own scream is more terrifying than any recorded one could be.

Frowning, Scott shoots her suggestion down. “Comedy,” he tries.

“Indie,” Stiles says, because he likes being contrary.

“Rom-Com,” Isaac and Malia say in unison, their voices almost matching tone. It’s only a little creepy.

Cora looks up from where she’s been filing her nails, adding “Action” to the mix.

They go around and around for a few minutes, switching from genres to actors to actresses to directors, Stiles suggesting “The Producers” at one point, his grin too wide to be taken seriously. None of those discussions get them anywhere, and so Danny starts going down a list in alphabetical order.

 _27 Dresses_ ends up being the pick of the night, Isaac and Malia wearing twin expressions of smugness as Danny convinces Cora to liberate his HDMI cord from the backpack that she’s sitting on.

As everything gets set up, Kira comments, “This is only going to keep us entertained for the night, though. What are we going to do tomorrow? Or after that?”

It’s a good question, something that Lydia’s been wondering, too. By now, it’s become obvious that the only reason why everyone is hanging out together so often is because Lydia is in town. Apparently they usually get together twice a week for exercise, because paranoia is a powerful tool and they’re all still afraid that the next time they have to fight for their lives won’t be far away.

“There’s an amusement park an hour and a half away that’s open 24-hours for the weekend, starting Thursday morning and going to Sunday night,” Derek provides, looking bored at the very idea.

Everyone exchanges glances for a minute or two, and then silences takes over the living room as Cora asks, in a faux-nonchalant voice, “Do they have the ride that lifts you up really high and drops you?”

Derek pauses, trying to remember. “I’m pretty sure.”

Total chaos breaks loose at that, even Lydia being caught up in the excitement of a 24-hour theme park.

-x-

_Seventh saved message._

One of her friends keeps asking her out. And it’s not a bad thing, per say, seeing as he’s attractive with good bone structure and doesn’t have a family history of heart disease or diabetes (she wouldn’t usually know that, but they had a class project where they had to look through their classmates’ family history). His name is William but he prefers Will, and his short curly dark hair frames his face in ways that is only enhanced with the frames of his glasses.

The glasses aren’t prescription, he just has a slight penchant for hipster fashion trends. Thank God he has enough fashion sense to not touch flannel, at least.

The first time he asks her out, it’s for the weekend that Scott’s in town. She turns him down politely, and when he follows up with a question about if it’s because she’s busy, she puts on her best coy smile and says, “Yes, but who says I’d go even if I wasn’t?”

Eyes laughing, he waves and heads off to class.

She thinks, if she were to go out with him, that it would be nice. Will is intelligent, they often engage in the type of long winding conversations that wrap around several subjects and reference others. Her other friends, when they get into those, roll their eyes and leave them to it, breaking off into groups of their own. He rows crew, and they’ve gone to the gym together a few times. Except for the rowing machine, she can hold her own against him.

So the next time he asks her out, when he mentions offhand that a new Italian place opened up a few blocks from his apartment, she just comments that she prefers Chinese and he can pick her up at seven on Friday night. Their friends kind of stare at them in shock, and then Kyle high-fives Will and they go back to studying.

On the date, everything goes perfectly. He pulls out the chair for her, and he orders something different enough from her sweet and sour pork that she doesn’t feel bad stealing a few bites from his plate. And they have the same type of conversation that she enjoys with him, long and rambling and somehow coming back to a point that now seems unrelated. It’s pleasant, it’s fun, and she has a nice time.

She very pointedly avoids thinking about how, if his hair was straightened, it’d be at the same length that Stiles keeps his at. The thought creeps in anyway, intrusive and uninvited, and she shoos it away before she can make too much of it. Stiles is thousands of miles away, and she isn’t interested in him besides.

When he drops her off, after sharing a kiss in front of her apartment door, she locks her door behind her and smiles the whole time while she’s showering, sings annoying songs that a less happy version of her would grumble at. Her voice is off key and too high on most of the notes, but she keeps singing anyway.

Outside of the shower, her phones rings and she sings louder, confidant that it’s Will calling to tell her that he had a good time, that they should do this again. And she’ll say yes, but she’s busy then, and she’s trying to work her schedule out for the next weekend but she’ll call him when she knows, okay?

It’s not fun if they don’t have to work for it.

Twenty minutes later, her hair still in a towel, she sits down on her bed and reaches for her phone. Swiping away the missed call message, she clicks on voicemail and flops back, ready to listen to Will’s suggestion of what they should do on their next date. She hope he’s not such a cliché to think a picnic would suit her, or something like a hike. Just because they go to the gym together doesn’t mean she’s going to start considering that a date.

She doesn’t even listen to the automated voice tell her who called, the time they did, because she already knows that Will called about half an hour ago. Wiggling her feet, she smiles to herself and waits.

“Okay, fuck,” someone starts, because that’s definitely not Will’s voice. “I know this is a shit idea, but I just wanted to say that I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I don’t even know what I’m sorry for, but, God, am I sorry for it. For whatever the fuck I did to make you stop talking to me. But, fuck’s sake, Lydia, it’s been over a year. Call me back already.”

On autopilot, she saves the message, her head beginning to pound. Because Stiles called her, and he’s right, it’s been over a year since they’ve spoken. It’s been over a year since she left him behind.

-x-

Driving back from the theme park, Stiles drops them off in the most convenient order, which leaves Lydia in the car alone with him after they’ve dropped off Liam, Malia, and Kira at their respective homes. Scott took Derek, Cora, Danny, and Isaac back in his car, and he has to go talk to Deaton once they get back, so when he asks Lydia to go with Stiles she can’t say no or she’ll look like a jerk and the pack will wonder why.

It doesn’t feel nearly as tense as the last time she road with him, good vibes still lingering from the carefree trip.

They’ve only been on the road long enough for the radio to have finished one song when Stiles asserts, “You didn’t love me.” He doesn’t falter, and his body language doesn’t indicate that he’s angry. Relaxed posture, loose grip on the steering wheel, foot tapping with the beat that’s coming through the speakers.

Yet another conversation she hadn’t been looking forward to. And maybe she’s just making up excuses, but she doesn’t want to have this conversation here, considering that she already has a headache and it’s only getting bigger by the minute. This discussion clearly isn’t going to help, but she can’t let him sit here and erase the feelings that she used to have for him. Digging her fingernails into the armrest, she retorts, “You have no idea how true I wish that was.” It would have saved her the uncomfortable summer after senior year, and maybe she would have kept in touch with more people than just Scott and occasionally Isaac and Liam.

That seems to upset him, but not much. “You didn’t. If you loved me, you would have called me back. Or picked up the phone, or, or. Something.” The only indication that he gives as to his irritation is forgetting to use his turn signal when he turns into her neighborhood.

 _If you loved me, you would have at least told me at the airport._ He throws the thought around his head carelessly, knowing that it’s useless. Knowing that Lydia has already decided how this discussion is going to end, and there’s nothing that he can say to stop it. Still, though, the words bite at him. He’d like to bite back.

Closing her eyes and forcing herself to take a deep breath, she tries to focus. _Every time I thought about calling you back it scared me so badly I threw up,_ she thinks. That would probably get a reaction out of him, but whether it would be the reaction she wants is up to debate. She doesn’t even know what reaction that she wants from him, whether she wants him to cry or laugh or scream at her. She’s exhausted from the day, and what she wants more than anything is to crawl into bed and sleep for a thousand years.

Exhaling slowly, she says with forced calm, “I did love you. And it may not have been in a recognizable way, but I did. You can’t just decide that I didn’t.” She’s not going to let him do this. He can’t just erase her.

“No, I know you didn’t love me. I was in love with you since I understood what it was, I would have noticed if you returned the feeling.” Confidence seeps through his every word and she only sort of wants to strangle him.

With as much control as she can muster, Lydia manages to say, “You didn’t even know me until sophomore year. Infatuation isn’t love, and while I’ll grant that you probably did love me after that, it doesn’t mean that I loved you any less,” without sounding like she wants to kill something. She reflects that her yoga classes are definitely helping her self-control, because before yoga she would have already been yelling.

Coming to a stop at the end of her driveway, he doesn’t even bother turning down towards her house. “That’s exactly what it means. Even if you did love me, I loved you more!” He’s enraged, knuckles white, and he whips around to face her with a ferocity she hasn’t seen from him except when their lives were in danger. “I loved you more,” he repeats, convinced that it means something.

She pops the door handle and climbs out quickly, glaring at him as she does so. Holding the door open, she glares at him and says abruptly, “Love isn’t a competition.”

Then she doesn’t care how childish it is, she slams the door as hard as she can. It feels fantastic.

It’s only after she’s gotten into her house and locked the door behind her that she remembers she’s staying with Scott for the time being, and her car is in his driveway. Oh, well. She’ll just have to call him to pick her up.

-x-

_Eighth saved message._

Two months after her first date with Will, they decide to make it official and move from seeing each other on dates to actually dating. And by official, Lydia means that they do everything. Make sure their friends know, she mentions it to her mom, even updates her Facebook profile. That’s what gets her, in the end, she’s sure of it. Because she told Scott a while ago that she was seeing someone, and he knows well enough to not tell Stiles now that he’s come to Boston and she told him she wasn’t speaking to Stiles anymore.

So she updates her Facebook, and _Lydia Martin is in a relationship with Will Anderson_ for everyone to see. Everyone, even her aunt who gets too drunk at family events and comments _‘Oh, hot stuff! Bring him around for Christmas’_ with the type of winky faces that only people over forty use. She sends Will a screenshot and tells him to be afraid, be very afraid.

At a bar with her friends, she’s nestled under Will’s arm and is nursing a rum and coke when she pulls out her phone to text Isaac, who is stuck inside studying at because he has a test on Monday. Reminding her friends back home that she still has more fun than they do is always pleasurable, so she takes a picture of her and Will, their drinks lifted high for him to see, and sends it off without worrying about it.

Two minutes later, Stiles is calling her. She ignores the call, sending it to voicemail and resolves that she’ll listen to the message later and save it after that. At this point, she’s given up thinking that she’ll eventually call him back.

That’s what she does, once she’s back at Will’s apartment and he’s taking a shower. She calls up voicemail and waits to hear what kind of shit storm she’s in for now that she’s in a public relationship.

It’s not a shit storm at all. It’s barely even a drizzle, really. All it is, in the end, is Stiles gets on the phone, takes a pause before beginning, and says, “I hope you're happy. I really do.” And then he hangs up, the message over as suddenly as it began.

She saves it to the archives and hangs up, head beginning to pound.

-x-

Scott is confused, to say the least, as to why she didn’t just get Stiles to drop her off at his house. Or why she didn’t call Stiles when she realized that they’d made a mistake. Not that he minds coming to get her, business with Deaton done for the day, but Stiles was still closer. Although he laughs a little bit about it on the drive back, mentioning to Lydia, “Maybe it’s a good thing that you didn’t say anything. He might have gotten jealous that you were staying with me instead of him.”

Turning up the air conditioning, she wonders whether or not she should talk about it with Scott. She’s talked about Allison with Scott, and that, surely, was harder than this will be. “Why would he be jealous?” she asks instead, because it’s fun to see Scott blush and stammer.

There it is, red coloring his cheeks in a mere instant. “Lydia,” he admonishes, grinning all the while.

“Scott,” she says, drawing out the syllable for something to do. “He doesn’t have anything to be jealous of, I know that,” she tacks on, because she’s not about to lose her friendship with Scott on the off chance that he might think she meant more by that comment than a simple joke.

“Did you actually talk to him? I know that he drove you from the airport, sorry about that, by the way. And he also drove you back from the theme park, so I know you’ve had the chance. Did you talk about things more important than the weather, though?” He’s curious, and she can’t blame him, because for the last two years he’s had to put up with her avoiding the subject at all costs while Stiles probably bombarded him with questions.

The way that she figures it, she can lie to Scott and tell him that they only talked about meaningless things. He might be able to tell that she’s lying if he’s focusing enough to listen to her heartbeat, but he’d probably respect her privacy enough to not ask for the truth, even if he did want to know. Or she can actually tell him the truth and explain that Stiles clearly doesn’t love her anymore and doesn’t want anything to do with her.

Neither seems appealing.

Sensing her apprehension, Scott changes the topic and says, “When I told him you were coming down, he begged me to let him pick you up from the airport. And I told him no, and he begged more, and then I said he could come with me, and he kept begging. For weeks, Lydia, he would mention it every time. And then, I caved. I told him ‘fine, go ahead’ because I figured it didn’t matter that much. I knew you didn’t talk to him, but it was a car ride.

“The day before, though, something changed. He asked me if I could pick you up instead of him. I’d already made plans, though, I was going to work at the clinic to get a few hours in. He was obsessive, telling me that he couldn’t. He tried making the excuse that he was afraid of driving through traffic.”

“Stiles, afraid of driving through traffic?” Lydia interrupts, a nervous laugh catching in her throat. She doesn’t know that she really wants to know where this is going.

He laughs, nodding. “Crazy, right? Especially when I have so many fond memories of his road rage almost killing us. But, yeah, he was nervous. He was crazy nervous, could barely think about it without shaking. And then, just as suddenly as it came, it was gone. I called him right before he would have left, said I’d changed my schedule around and I’d be fine to pick you up. And he told me, completely relaxed, that it was fine, he had everything under control.” Turning into his neighborhood, he drums his fingers lightly against the dashboard.

“He didn’t mention a reason,” she says, wondering what great lesson she’s supposed to take from this. She might be halfway towards a degree from MIT, but when it comes to Scott’s seemingly unrelated parables she’s clueless.

Shrugging, he just smirks a little bit. “Stiles loves you. And it scares him, it scares him a lot. Because he tried to get over it, and he tried to ignore it, and he tried to reach out to you. Nothing worked, and I think he thought that this was his last chance. So I think, whatever has you so uptight about him, that was meant to be a gesture. He wanted things to work out. I’m just telling you, do with that as you will.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she snaps, because that’s the only option that makes sense. Considering anything else would be too strange. Not strange, that’s not the word. Preposterous is closer, but still not quite right. She doesn’t know the word she needs, there are too many words and not enough her and nothing is making sense.

He pulls into his driveway and gives her a sad sort of smile. “I’m not saying that you need to go to him and declare that you’re made to be together, because if you don’t want to that obviously doesn’t need to happen. Just think about how he might feel, and whether or not you want him to feel that way. Okay?”

Her throat is too dry for her to say anything, so she nods absently instead.

-x-

_Ninth saved message._

She and Will break up because he doesn’t like to hear her lecture on quantum mechanics anymore, and she thinks if he rolls his eyes at her in the gym one more time she’s going to claw his face off. Conversations that would have been winding six months ago are choppy instead, and laced with disinterested smiles. Even the sex wasn’t as good, more often used as a distraction from the failing relationship than from true desire. So, in a way, it’s mutual.

It would have been, at least, if it hadn’t ended with him dropping his jaw at the fact she broke up with him.

They do manage to stay friends at least, knowing that at this point their friend groups are so entangled that peeling them apart would be more trouble than it’s worth.

The relationship lasted six months, which is a healthy time period for a college relationship. Not short enough to blow off as a fling, not so long that their friends are devastated. Both of them have better things to worry about anyway, things that are more important than when their next orgasm is going to be. She does, at least.

Her mother is sad to hear about it, but happy that Lydia understands that she can do better than an MIT gym rat who does his differential equations homework while on the treadmill. She tells Scott, too, not so much as drops it in conversation as sends him a text saying ‘I don’t have to kill Will because I dumped him instead’ that feels far more satisfactory than it should. She doesn’t put it on Facebook, though, because setting her status to single means some people will speculate that she got dumped instead of the opposite. She hides her status instead.

Lydia Martin doesn’t get dumped. No matter what Jackson Whittemore has to say on the subject.

About five minutes after Scott is let known, a call comes in from Stiles. She watches it, and she thinks about picking it up. It seems symbolic in some way that she can’t quite wrap her head around. But when she reaches for the phone, she chickens out at the last second, and she can’t do it. She can’t answer it right now.

He hasn’t called her since the first night she and Will made it official. So it’s been six months and she hasn’t ever heard his voice, has no idea how he’s doing other than his tweets during biology about how remedial this course is, and it’s considered biology two?? That’s all she has to go on, that and Scott’s offhand remarks about Stiles not being so high strung anymore.

And it isn’t like he called her very often in the first place, but she felt that it meant something. It meant something that he stayed away when she was in a relationship, that he was finally trying to give her the space that she had forced upon him. She’d wanted him to call, at first, had wondered about how he felt. And then she’d realized she wasn’t doing any good sitting around and wondering, and she’d left well enough alone.

But now there’s a missed call notification on her screen, and she’s just waiting for the one that follows. The one that’s always followed. There is it, one new voicemail reading out like she’d knew it would.

She doesn’t check the message now. She’s getting ready for dinner with a few of her friends, girls who will pout and act upset when they find out about her split from Will, but will later go to him and make pitiful attempts at comfort. One of them will be his rebound, in all likelihood. She hasn’t figured out who hers will be just yet.

It’s a few hours later when she listens to the message, and she’s laying on her bed with a few glasses of white wine in her thanks to her fake ID, her stomach feeling pleasantly bubbly. Maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s the anticipation. Maybe it’s Maybelline.

She laughs at her own wit and enters her password, biting her lip all through the introduction that comes before all voicemail. Stiles Stilinski called her four hours ago, and he left a message. She thinks the words over again, in her head. He left a message.

“Lydia, um, Scott just told me that you and, uh, Will, broke up.” He’s trying to sound casual and utterly failing. It’s more adorable than she’s willing to admit. “I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Liar,” she whispers, smiling. He doesn’t even pretend to sound sorry, that’s how smug he is.

“Just wanted to give my condolences. I’m here if you need me. Just give me a call, but, wow, I didn’t think I was going to go there. You obviously won’t give me a call. And that’s fine. Fine, really, that’s fine. Don’t call if you don’t want to, but you clearly don’t mind my calls since you haven’t blocked my number yet. Fuck, I didn’t want to do this, but you’re single, and I’m an idiot. I don’t even know what we are.” He sighs, and then ends the call.

She doesn’t know what to do, but she saves the message anyway. Thanking about it, she doesn’t know what they are, either. Because they’re not friends. She hasn’t spoken to him in two years, they’re not friends. But it’s not like they hate each other, either, because if she hated him she would have put a stop to this madness when she left Beacon Hills, not let it fester, unhindered, for quite so long.

-x-

It’s decided that, for Lydia’s last night in town, they’re all going to have dinner together. The diner they met at earlier in the week not only makes a mean breakfast, but they also serve curly fries that make Lydia positively weak in the knees and milkshakes that should be counted as a meal within themselves.

Arriving early with Scott, Lydia decides that she’s going to be in control this evening, and she feels it. Her outfit has been put together to remind her of what she was like in high school, short flowy skirt and blouse with high heeled ankle boots. She’s calm, which is suspicious. She shouldn’t be calm right now, not according to all of the media she’s consumed that’s telling her to freak out. Heart palpitations, finding it hard to breathe, or something, she wants something. Honestly, the fact that she’s not stressing out is kind of stressing her out.

She has a plan, and that’s horrible because this is something that should be spontaneous and natural, but she’s bad at both of those. For her, finding dead bodies is spontaneous and natural. Or, supernatural, at the very least. Romance doesn’t come nearly as easily.

The pack comes into the diner a few at a time. Cora and Isaac come in with Derek behind them, chatting with one of the waitresses before making their way to the table in the corner. Malia and Kira walk in later, and when Kira waves at Lydia the lights shine a little brighter for a moment. “Oops,” she mouths, pulling out a chair next to Isaac and sitting down. Liam comes right after, smiling as he takes the seat by Scott. Danny already let her know that he wouldn’t be able to make it, so that leaves them with only one missing member.

The table seats eight people, which is the exact number that they have. It’s circular, too, so they can squeeze in more people as necessary. It’s always necessary, it seems, or maybe it’s that Lydia’s most vivid memories of the place are after lacrosse games, with at least fifteen people jammed around the area, or when they’d come for pack meetings and Derek, still the alpha at that point, sat surrounded by a group of teenagers he only vaguely knew what to do with. Erica and Boyd had been with them, at that point, and even Allison had made appearances.

They’ve lost so many people. For every wedding that she’s been to, she’s attended two funerals. Maybe that’s sad, maybe that’s uncommon and depressing and puts an emotion toll on her, but most of the time it’s just her reality.

Even though she’s been calm, she expects anxiety to flood through her when she catches sight of Stiles through the window. Instead, her heartbeat seems to slow down. The sense of tranquility that’s been making itself known since she first listened to the message doesn’t leave her. It grows stronger, and the mere sight of him has her strangely still. As though she knows everything is going to work out, as though there’s nothing to be worried about in the first place. As though she’s looking at him and thinking, “There you are. I’ve been waiting for you.”

As Stiles enters the diner, taking his jacket off as he comes through the door, he notices the filled chairs instantly. Scans the table again, checks for possible openings and the only one he can see is between Scott and Lydia. As per her orchestration, of course, be he doesn’t know that. He might be able to guess, Lydia supposes, but he’s got nothing except theory so he can’t prove anything.

“What’s the special?” he asks, strolling over and clasping Scott’s hand in a sort of bro hug that’s clearly limited since Scott is sitting down.

Cora points to the sign behind the counter, which describes a plate of nachos with curly fries instead of chips, and Stiles takes a moment to thank God that his genetic predisposition to high cholesterol hasn’t been bad enough to where he has to eat healthy for himself. “Praise,” he says, running his fingers through his hair.

He does all of this without looking at Lydia, but she doesn’t take offense. She has a plan.

Standing and grabbing an empty chair at the next table over, Scott wedges the chair between his and Lydia’s with a smile before sitting back down. “They added a chocolate peppermint milkshake,” he says, reaching over and rubbing his face against Stiles’s neck gently. At Stiles’s unimpressed glance, he shrugs. “Scent is a big thing, you know that. Don’t act like this is new.”

“Fuckin’ werewolves,” Stiles says in good humor, ruffling Scott’s hair and turning to Derek. “You may have pushed me against walls on the regular, but at least I never had to deal with you rubbing against me.”

Derek rolls his eyes and says with a sense of patience that has to have been practiced, “I wouldn’t have had to shove you against so many walls if you just would have shut up every once and while.”

Biting her lip, Lydia tries to keep from laughing, but she remembers a time when Stiles wouldn’t shut up, even under the threat of death. She doesn’t know what happened to transform him from that into the man who drove her from the airport and let silence permeate the car.

With a grumble, Stiles rolls his eyes and turns his head from Derek, meeting Lydia’s eyes in the process. It takes a moment, but then he offers up the smallest of rueful grins.

It may be a bit forced, but Lydia is willing to take what she can get. At least, until she can get a little more.

From there, the conversation flows fairly smoothly, and their food comes out. The table is cramped, plates and glasses taking up almost all of the area. What’s left is filled with condiments or crumpled napkins, because the majority of the wolves are messy eaters. Empty sugar packets are piled high next to Isaac’s plate, and at this point it’s closer to the truth to say that he’s having coffee with his sugar instead of sugar with his coffee.

Malia almost cuts Liam’s hand off when he reaches across her plate for the ketchup, and her knife only swerves at the last moment to avoid stabbing into the flesh of his arm. Cora steals fries from Isaac’s plate while Kira distracts him, and Derek tries to stop her at first but gives in when she starts sharing the spoils of her victory with him. Scott and Stiles hold a conversation about the practicality of Scott getting a dog when school starts in the fall. It results in Stiles making more dog jokes than usual, and Isaac and Liam groan every time he says, “He’ll be your brother!”

“You guys can take him on walks through the preserve,” Lydia provides helpfully, trying to imagine Isaac walking a dog without grumbling. The image doesn’t come easily.

Nodding, Stiles holds up his index finger and says, “She has a point,” sparing a small smile in Lydia’s direction as thanks for the help. That smile is what gives her the confidence in her plan, and with that she slips her hand bravely into Stiles’s and waits for catastrophe to strike.

Stiles stills, but doesn’t pull his hand away, and he continues the discussion after a brief, sudden pause. Scott is totally normal, too, though whether he knew this was coming or not, she doesn’t know. Isaac notices, flicking his eyes over her like he’s trying to figure out what game she’s playing. Lydia avoids his gaze, and Cora’s too when the Hale arches an eyebrow without saying anything. Derek and Liam don’t give any sign of being aware, even though they must be. She’ll take what small mercies she can get.

When Malia nudges Kira and points at her hand clasped in Stiles’s, the smaller girl just nods and redirects their discussion back to Scott’s possible new dog. “He can go on runs with the pack!” she exclaims, nodding the slightest bit at Lydia as she does so.

If Lydia has ever had a bad thought toward Kira, she doesn’t believe it any longer. Kira is an angel.

With that, everyone just seems to acknowledge that they shouldn’t say anything. Stiles is still unmoving, but she can feel his pulse racing beneath her fingers. And then he relaxes, takes in a breath and keeps talking, his hand still in hers. He doesn’t exactly seem to enjoy, doesn’t tangle their fingers together in a way that would probably be more comfortable, but he doesn’t pull away either.

And an hour later, empty plates surrounding them as the conversation dies down, he still hasn’t pulled away. He’s had opportunities to, chances where it would have looked necessary and not like a rejection, but he’s still sat next to her and kept his hand still beneath hers.

“Oh, man, I forgot. I have to drop by the hospital and talk to my mom for a while,” Scott brings up, leaning forward past Stiles to speak to Lydia.

She smiles congenially and pulls her eyebrows together gently, as though this is news to her. And then, squeezing Stiles’s hand, she turns to him to put the next part of her plan into action. “Stiles, could you drive me back? Scott’s house is on your way,” she says, because she knows it is, Scott knows the route that Stiles takes to the diner.

Stiles glances over at her and then looks to Scott, clearly aware that something is going on that he’s not aware of. “I need to go by the station. I’m bringing my dad dinner, he’s working overnight.”

Lydia prevents herself from letting the shock she’s feeling spread across her features. Stiles being unable to drive her basically stops the plan, and she’s trying to figure out whether or not it’s too late to put plan B into action when Isaac saves the day and keeps plan A possible.

“Let me take him something, I haven’t seen the Sheriff in forever,” Isaac comments, spinning the straw around in his milkshake. When Lydia looks over to him, he’s staring at Scott instead of Stiles.

Drumming his fingers on the table, Stiles repeats the motion he did earlier, where his gaze jumped from Lydia to Scott and then back to Lydia, only this time he throws Isaac into the mix. Scott, Isaac, Lydia, Scott, Lydia, Isaac, and then a hopeless glance thrown in Derek’s direction as though the older werewolf might have an idea of what’s going on. Derek, dutiful to Scott as ever, keeps his eyes on his curly fries as he finishes the plate.

“Yeah, Isaac can do that,” Scott says when Stiles hasn’t spoken up yet.

Isaac nods, lazily stealing a fry from Derek’s plate. “Come on, your old man likes me,” he goads.

“Because you let him eat chili cheese fries, of course he likes you, you don’t give a shit about his cholesterol intake,” Stiles says, looking to Lydia with eyes that no longer look clueless. “Bring him a salad.”

“Sure thing, boss,” Isaac says, throwing a few bills on the table. Standing, he motions for Lydia to do the same as he walks around the table.

She does, moving her hand from Stiles’s as she grins at him and raises her arms.

He wraps his arms around her, hugging her tightly enough that she’s clued in that he must be using some of his werewolf strength. “Stay safe in Boston, Martin,” he whispers, pressing his lips to her cheek. “I don’t want to have to come up there to kick anyone’s ass. I have better plans for my frequent flyer miles.”

Laughing, she releases him finally and lets a smile shine through. “I’ll kick their asses myself, but thanks for the offer. You should come visit me sometime.” She’d say that she’ll come back to visit, but she doesn’t want to make any promises if she’s not sure she’ll keep them.

Everyone comes to hug their goodbyes then, and it’s all very heartfelt. Maybe more so than the first time, because now they know she took two years to come back. They seem to understand that, other than coming to see their graduations, her return isn’t guaranteed by any means. Even Cora hugs her, which is saying something.

Finally, Lydia stands, slightly awkwardly and watches them all file out. Goodbyes said, she feels a little useless with nothing left to do. So she stands next to Scott and Stiles, a little lonely, even as she remembers the plan.

“I’m going to head out,” Scott says, dropping a twenty by his place at the table. With that, he moves to hug Lydia, and says, “Text me when you get back. We’re leaving early in the morning. Seven, no later,” he informs her.

With Scott’s arms around her, it’s hard to think of leaving again. Even if she does want to go back to Boston, she’ll still miss Beacon Hills. As small of a town as it is, and as fucked up of a town as it is, it’s still her town. She might always think of it that way. “I’ve got my alarm set already, believe me.”

“See you in the morning,” Scott says, smiling in a way that she wishes he wouldn’t. Turning to Stiles, he says, “Let’s get lunch when I’m back. We’re going to have a lot to talk about.”

Stiles leans back and nods, looking between them once again like he’s trying to figure out what they know that he doesn’t. Clearly, there’s something going on that he hasn’t been let in on. “Whatever you say, man. See you tomorrow,” he says, waving as Scott walks off to his car and he and Lydia turn the other way into the parking lot.

“Sorry that I kind of volunteered you to drive me,” Lydia says, not sorry at all. She sounds like she is, though, and that’s what’s important right now.

Stiles shrugs, getting out his keys when the Jeep comes into view. “You were right, it’s on my way. I don’t mind, though.” It’s only a little bit of a lie, not big enough for any of the wolves to take notice of even if they were here.

Huffing out a breath, she wonders how to bring it up. The plan got her this far, but now she’s on her own and she doesn’t want to be. Suspiciously, she still isn’t nervous. She’s calm and relaxed, tension drained out of her as though she’s spent the last twenty four hours getting a full body massage. She’s stress free, but she’s curious, because this isn’t something that’s going to come up naturally unless they reminisce about high school.

She doesn’t want to reminisce about high school. That’s over and done with, and they’re in the here and now.

“You coming?” he asks, standing by the Jeep and staring at her expectantly.

The words catch in her throat, but she powers through it, gets it out without making a total fool of herself. “Uh, yeah. Coming, sorry about that.”

For a moment, his expression changes. It’s the same expression that he was wearing at the airport, the one that made her feel like she was under a microscope. Without changing his countenance, he unlocks the door and turns to fully face her. “What was that, in there?” His voice is neutral, and she can’t discern anything despite trying.

She has the opportunity to play dumb, but she feels too collected in that. Avoiding the subject would only be counterproductive to the end result that she's trying to achieve. With that, she holds her chin a little higher so that he’s looking at her from a better angle and says, “You mean when I held your hand.”

“When you held my hand,” he accepts. No judgement, no disgust or curiosity. Only a statement as a follow up to a question that’s he’s expecting her to answer.

This is what she’s waited two years for. This is what she was afraid of when Scott brought it up. This is where the evening comes together, with them never speaking again or with her calling him back. She wants it to be the latter. “I know you love me,” she admits, careful with the declaration. She wants him to understand the tense that she’s using it in, that they’re not talking about when they still spoke or even when they were still friends. She means now, after a two year radio silence on her end, she means that he loved her then and he loves her and he couldn’t have stopped if he tried. And she’s listened to those voicemails. He tried.

He flinches, but his expression shifts back into neutral too fast for her to catch what emotion the brief transformation was caused by. “Yeah, well, what else is new? That’s in the old business part of pack meetings, Lydia, and I thought you were smart enough to know that. I don’t want to stand out here and have this discussion again. I don’t want to talk about this and then have you ignore me for two years, okay? Can you please just get in the car so that I can drive you home in silence and I can get on with my life? Please,” he tacks on, voice cracking.

“I love you, too,” she blurts, wondering in the back of her mind why she thought it would be a good idea to say that. In the car, when she said she’d loved him he would have thrown her out if they hadn’t already been at her house. Now she’s probably going to have to walk home.

Stiles looks at her, and for the first time she notices how tired he is. How he can’t even stand straight when he’s looking at her, as though he might fall down at any moment. “Get in the car, Lydia.” He sounds defeated.

She hasn’t come two thousand miles to give up now. “Not until you say you love me,” she asserts. Maybe it’s stupid and useless, and it probably won’t actually get her anywhere, but she needs to hear him say it. She needs more than just evidence compiled from the archives on her phones and from her conversation with Scott. He’s going to say it, and it’s all going to be okay.

“Get in the car,” he snaps, baring his teeth as he says it.

“Not until you say it,” she shouts, moving her hands to her hips.

Eyes meeting hers, he forces himself to keep composure and not just drive off without her. “Lydia. Get in the fucking car, I swear to God.”

All of her previous feelings of serenity and calmness fly out the window. She wants to ram his head into hood of the Jeep, he’s being so stubborn. “Say you love me,” she says, and she sounds a thousand times more in control than she feels. Good.

Stiles closes his eyes and tilts his head back, but when he looks at her again his eyes are shining like there’s a fire inside him, tears drawn to the surface and a thinly veiled rage on the edge, both just waiting to be let loose. “Fine, do you want me to say it? I love you. And if it gets you in the God damn car, it will be the only good thing I’ve ever gotten out of it. I’ve loved you for years, years, and I’ve hated it for just as long. Loving you has gotten me headaches and hangovers and pity, but it had better get you in this car.”

The plan has gone out the window. Lydia is in uncharted territory, but she’s seen Stiles like this before. Cruel and merciless, this is the Stiles who does what needs to be done. Regardless of moral qualms, regardless of what exactly it is and who exactly it needs to be done to, he’ll go out and get the job done just for it to be over. And then she realizes that, if he’s become this person with her, he wants it to be over. He wants it to all be over.

She had a plan, and the plan has to be scrapped, because this isn’t making sense. This wasn’t in the plan, wasn’t a possibility until he made it into one. There’s a lump in her throat that she can’t move, and her words can’t get around it. Still, she has to manage something. “I listened to your messages.”

“I figured you did.” His voice still sounds angry and out of control, but there’s a curiosity behind his words.

Desperate to salvage something, anything, she whispers, “I want a second chance. Let this be our second chance.”

This needs to be enough, has to be enough. If this declaration doesn’t fix things, then she can’t fix anything. They’ll be broken beyond repair, and she’ll be left with an archive on her phone that only serves to make her heart hurt and eyes burn.

-x-

_One unheard message._

It’s been an hour since her conversation with Scott, and his words are heavy in her mind. _Stiles loves you. And it scares him, it scares him a lot._ It scares her a lot, too. Laying in bed, she goes through her contacts and brings up Stiles’s information. Her thumb hovers above the little green phone icon, but something keeps her from pressing down. It’s like there’s a force field that only turns on when she thinks about calling him back, and she can’t remember a time when it wasn’t there.

Surely she can’t have had these feelings in high school. It must have been easier, then, to pick up the phone and talk with him, however briefly. It had to have been. She just can’t believe that she ever used to see his name and not feel her heart in her throat, ready to burst at the sight.

Backing out of her contacts, she instead goes to email. Her landlord is keeping her updated on how the plumbing is coming, how the apartment will be ready for her when she comes back the day after tomorrow. Her flight leaves in the early morning, and she’s already checked with Scott to ensure that he’s really the one driving her back. Three hours trapped in a car with Stiles, the tension never ceasing, would be hell.

After taking care of business, she sets her phone aside and looks at the ceiling. One day, she tells herself, she’ll make things right. One day she’ll call him back and answer his voicemails and tell him everything, how she’d thought of him on the flight from LA to Boston and cried the whole way. Even then, she’d wanted to change things. What things, she’s not sure. Because she loves MIT, loves Boston, loves her research and her friends and her life on the east coast. Still, it feels cramped sometimes, as though there are things she doesn’t have time for.

One day she’ll be able to get off Skype with Scott and not feel an enormous weight pressing down on her chest, one day she’ll stop visiting graveyards because it lessens her headaches. One day she’ll be better, but the words feel empty even as she thinks them.

And then she does what she always does, when she’s tired and worn thin and needs a few more reasons to hate herself. She unlocks her phone and calls her voicemail, entering her password and selecting the archives before the automated voice can say anything. It starts with the first message, Stiles asking how she is, unaware of the fact that she’s not going to speak to him for two years.

It starts with a single message, but that’s not right. It starts with her on a plane, hands clenched as she makes a vow to not let silly schoolgirl notions interfere with her future. It starts with the Jeep in her driveway, Stiles staring silently at her window for an hour before calling Scott for the jump. It starts with the pack meeting that happened before she left, how she hugged everyone goodbye and avoided eye contact only with him because it felt too awkward. It starts with a kiss in the middle of a panic attack, when she’s so nervous that she hears her own heartbeat. It starts with her taking his hand and leading him out into an ice rink. It starts with him asking for her help in translating Archaic Latin because she got bored with the regular format. It starts with his eyes following her everywhere, always noticing her even when she wishes he wouldn’t. Especially when she wishes he wouldn’t.

It starts in the art classroom in third grade, a boy with brown hair and eyes the color of the drink her daddy keeps in the special cabinet. It starts when she asks if she can borrow a colored pencil, a red one, because she’s doing a picture of her family and needs her hair to look right. It starts when he passes her the red and a golden one, too, saying that she’s more of a strawberry blonde than a redhead.

By the time she’s listened to all the messages, what started out as a slight pain near her temple has transformed into a full blown migraine. One hand at the back of her neck, she reaches over to end the call. The automated voice informs her that she has reached the end of the archive, and Lydia rolls her eyes. Nine messages later, and she’s left just as confused as before. And apparently Stiles is, too, because the archives end and I don’t even known what we are is still ringing in her ears, just as confusing as the first time she heard it.

She wants to tell him that it’s okay, she doesn’t know what they are either.

 _You have one unheard message,_ announces the creepy robot voice, and Lydia starts in surprise. She hasn’t had any missed calls recently, no voicemail notifications. And she checks her notifications, goes through them when they come in, she doesn’t just ignore them unless there are too many to look through at once. The last time there had been too many, she’d been sitting next to Stiles in the Jeep, her phone only just off airplane mode. She hadn’t even glanced at the notifications, figuring that she’d find something out later if it was that important.

Hand shaking, she presses the necessary buttons to listen to the newest message. _Call from Stiles Stilinski,_ and then she finds out that he called the day of her flight, and the time sounds like it must have come in just after she’d set her phone to be unable to receive calls or texts.

There’s a shuddering pause, and then it begins. “Lydia, hey. Listen, I know we haven’t talked recently, or ever, really, but you’re coming home. And I get that you don’t want to talk to me, but I think I know why. I didn’t want to do this through the phone, but it’s not like you’re giving me much a choice here. The way that I see it, you coming home means something. Maybe you agree, maybe you don’t, but I think it does and since you’re not talking to me right now I can pretend that you do, too. It’s been two years since I’ve talked to you, and we’re going to see each other every day for a week.” He breathes heavily before continuing.

“I was in love with you in high school. And maybe you started ignoring my calls because you figured I’d get over it faster, because that makes sense. And maybe you kept ignoring my calls because it seemed hard to stop once you started, but that’s okay. Here’s the thing, Lydia. We had something, because it wasn’t just me. In the beginning? Yeah, all right, I totally agree, that was all me. By the end, though, you can’t tell me you didn’t feel anything.”

In the pit of her stomach, a feeling has started to grow and she doesn’t know what to do with it, doesn’t even know if she can identify it. So she sits, eyes slammed shut, and keeps listening.

He picks up speed, made confidant by his previous statements. “Fuck, Lydia, I don’t know how ignoring me has been working for you, but it hasn’t exactly done any wonders for me. I’m still stuck on you, the same as I’ve always been. I dated a girl for a while, and she dumped me because I kept saying your name in my sleep. You coming home doesn’t have to be a bad thing. I don’t know if Scott told you, but I’m picking you up from the airport.”

She wants to cut the message off, hang up and pretend that she hasn’t heard any of it. Her stomach cramps from just hearing all of this, imagining how Stiles must have taken hours to get up the courage to leave this message, how he might have made a little list of the things he wanted to bring up.

“This is our second chance. And if you don’t want anything to do with me in that way, fine, I can deal with that. If you think we won’t work as lovers, sure, nothing I can do about that, but, fuck, Lydia, you can’t tell me that we don’t work as friends.” Pausing, he seems to think everything over, make sure that he hasn’t forgotten to say anything. And then, finally, he finishes, “I’m picking you up from the airport. Please, let this be our second chance. God, I can’t wait to see you.”

The words echo in her ears, and anticipation thrums through her veins. _God, I can’t wait to see you,_ she thinks, the thought repeating until it’s printed across her mind. Her stomach is calmed, her pulse steady, and she knows what she needs to do. At the diner, tomorrow night, she knows what she needs to do.

-x-

Stiles fixes her with his neutral look again, only this time there’s a crack in his mask of forced calm. He’s hopeful, despite his misgivings, and she thinks that he might need this as much as she does. “You listened to my messages.” It’s not a question.

“I listened to the last one last night.” Her knees are weak, high heels were a terrifically bad idea.

“I left that message almost a week ago. How didn’t you get it before?”

So she tells him, tells him about her conversation with Scott and how listening to the messages has become a tradition that never fails to make her feel worse about herself. She tells him about the surprise that flooded through her when she realizes she must have swiped the notification away, originally. Breathing hard, she says, “So when I saw you at the airport, I hadn’t heard it yet. I didn’t know.”

Swallowing, he dares to ask her, “Didn’t know what?”

And this is what she’s been ignoring him for, because it hurts a little to admit that she shouldn’t have done it. It hurts to know that she was wrong to just let him go to voicemail all of those times, but it was wrong. She was wrong. Exhaling slowly, she whispers, “I didn’t know you’d still want me.” Her body aches, and if he rejects her she’s going to be okay. She’s Lydia Martin, she’ll pick up the pieces and go back to her life like nothing’s happened.

She doesn’t want to do that. She wants him to give in to what they are, what they’ve always been that she’s turned a blind eye to for so long. “Please. Please still want me,” she whispers, aware that desperation is bleeding into her tone.

Chest heaving, Stiles takes his time before replying. “I’m always going to want you.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. “What do you want me to do about it?”

This is the part where a younger Lydia would have gotten scared, would have looked away and asked meekly for him to take her home. A younger Lydia, a Lydia who still fought the supernatural because she didn’t have a choice, would nonetheless have been terrified of her own feelings. This Lydia isn’t comfortable with her feelings by any means, but she’s spent two years running away and she can’t do it any longer. She has to face this.

“I’m going back tomorrow,” she says, mind running a mile a minute, “but we have tonight.”

Meeting her eyes, Stiles goes still for a moment and then shakes his head. “You’re going back tomorrow.”

Lydia shuts her eyes and presses her lips into a thin line. Of course. Straightening her shoulders and lifting her chin, she remembers a far off conversation with Allison. _Never frown, someone could be falling in love with your smile_. That makes her feel worse, not better, and it leaves her wondering if she’d be better off calling Scott and asking him to take her back after talking with his mom.

“Fuck it,” Stiles says suddenly, slamming the driver’s side door shut. If she’s going to offer him a night, then he’s going to take it. And maybe he’ll just hate himself even more in the morning, but it’s the only chance that he’s being given.

Squinting, she looks at him and tries to dislodge the lump in her throat to no avail.

He stands in front of her, on the precipice of everything that they are. It’s all going to change now, and he can’t tell whether it’s going to get better or worse. “I want you.” It’s a statement, the one truth in his life that he’s come to accept as unchanging no matter how much he hates it.

“I love you,” she whispers, nearly choking on the words. She didn’t see it going this way, with them standing out in a parking lot as street lamps illuminate how fucked up she’s made everything between them.

All of the momentum that he’s built up, the determination that was flooding through his veins when he slammed that door, the resolve that had taken over him when he’d made his declaration. It all abandons him at that. I want you, he’d said, certain that the words would damn him. I love you, she’d returned, and those sentences sound similar but they aren’t the same thing at all. He wonders if she knows.

Barrier broken, she goes on. “I love you, and I don’t want just a night. That’s all we have, and if that’s all you want, okay. But I’m going to Boston in the morning, and when I get on that plane I want something to come back to.”

His hands are hanging at his side, useless. “You’re going to leave, and what’s going to change? Nothing, it’ll be the same as it’s always been. That’s how it’s going to be.” He wishes he believed differently.

“Something will change. We won’t just go back to the way we were before.”

“What’s going to change, then? Don’t give me empty promises, tell me what’s going to change.”

Lydia looks at him, green eyes shining with unshed tears, and she whispers, “I’m going to call you back.”

The tension between them tightens and then shatters, broken by the way that Stiles reaches for her like a lifeline, helpless with the way that he touches her skin like a prayer. Their lips crash together, his hands cupping her face with the gentlest of pressures as hers scramble to grasp at his sides in an attempt to bring him closer.

At first, it’s closed mouth and sweet, the embrace of young lovers embarking on a path together. It’s the type of kiss that they should have shared years ago, if she’d been able to accept her feelings earlier and he’d been able to act on his. It’s the type of kiss that his ten year plan would have gotten him, gentle and innocent and everything they aren’t. And then it shifts, viscous in the way that he sucks her bottom lip into his mouth and scraps his teeth over the top of it. The innocence is gone, pure intent left in its wake.

When the kiss is finally broken, when Stiles pulls away with eyes that are too frenzied to be considered sane and Lydia rests against his frame, hands on his chest to keep herself steady, they’re both breathing heavily.

“Don’t take me back to Scott’s,” she whispers, nearly pleading with him. Fisting her hands in his shirt, she leans into him and presses her lips against his once more, dragging them up his chin until they’re resting where she wants them. “My house isn’t occupied for the night, you know. Mom hasn’t been here since I got back, so we’d have the whole place to ourselves.”

Fingering the keys in his pocket, he mumbles, “If you thought I was going to take you back to Scott’s, you don’t know me very well. And I’d take us to your house, but mine’s closer. Plus, like I said, my dad’s working an overnight.” With that, he grins against her mouth and runs his tongue over her bottom lip.

“I like the way you think,” Lydia responds, pulling away finally. Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she watches with bated breath as he spins his keys around his finger, an invitation and a promise all at once. As he unlocks the passenger side, she realizes that she can’t wait. “Let’s get going then, shall we?”

He opens the door for her, holding it until she’s seated inside and trying to shift an innocent expression on her features. Instead, she looks impatient and impish, but he can’t say that it’s a bad look on her. He can’t say that anything is a bad look on her, honestly. Once he’s seated as well, turning the ignition without waiting, he takes a moment to thank God that Roscoe bit the dust and he doesn’t have to worry about the Jeep randomly deciding not to start. “Who are you texting?”

Looking away from where her thumbs were typing out a message, she laughs a little. “Scott. I’m telling him to pick me up from your place tomorrow, sound good? My stuff is already packed in his car, so it’s not like I have to go back to the McCall’s.” She twirls a piece of hair around her finger and smirks.

Aware that she’s asking him for permission, Stiles reaches across the console and tugs her in for another kiss, deepening it only moments after she gives into his touch. “Oh man, Scott is going to give me so much grief for this,” he says, the grin on his face as light as the touch of his forehead to hers.

“I’ll bear the brunt of it, since I’ll see him first.” As she watches him turn the ignition and start the Jeep, Lydia considers how smug Scott will be in the morning. “I’m sure he’ll have some things to say to you, too, though.”

He snickers, turning them onto the main road. “Well then it’s our job to make sure we have enough stories to tell him.” As the street light fly by, he remembers driving Lydia this way when she first got into town, how she’d only just released his hand and had sat clutching the seat instead. Then, the atmosphere had seemed thick with tension, and he’d rolled the windows down in an effort to feel less trapped.

This time, the atmosphere is still thick, but it’s with anticipation instead.

Arriving at his house, Stiles pauses after the car has come to a stop. “Last chance to back out,” he says, only half joking as he turns to her.

Lydia is quick to laugh, fisting a hand in the soft flannel of his shirt and tugging him across the console. “Not on your life,” she whispers, lips on his before he can think to protest.

They stumble through the driveway and into the house in a tangle of limbs, and he doesn’t waste any more time once the door is closed. He shoves her against the wall and starts unbuttoning her shirt as quickly as he can manage, and she gets to work on his own while he’s busy with hers. T-shirts and unbuttoned flannels take less time to get off than dress shirts with buttons, but there isn’t quite as much of an opportunity to drag hands along one’s partner’s chest while in the removal process. Lydia is a little mournful about that.

By the time they’re both shirtless, chests heaving in unison, she’s partially wondering if this is such a great idea, despite having fought for this for so long. She’s going back to Boston tomorrow. Back to MIT, back to her roommates and the small group of friends she’s formed ties with over the years. And she doesn’t know when she’s going to come back to Beacon Hills again, or if she even will. And then Stiles brushes a hand through her hair, and she remembers she has something to come back to.

“Bedroom?” Stiles asks, hands dragging along the waistline of her skirt. Asks like it’s a question, like there are other options and it’s totally up to her as to which of those options she’d like to explore.

Her thoughts about the ill-advised reasons for doing this fly out of her head in an instant, disappearing as soon as he grins and presses down against her hips. “Bedroom,” she agrees breathlessly. Other options are a little too much for her to think about at the moment. She’ll reconsider when her mental faculties come online again.

The smile he gives her is so close to a smirk that it sends shivers down her spine in the most delectable of ways, and she takes his hand to yank him up the stairs after gathering up their shirts. They aren’t going to actually make it to the bedroom if he keeps looking at her like that. Especially not with that smirk on his face.

Stiles’s room hasn’t changed since high school, she finds. There’s even the board with whatever mystery he’s solving at the moment, red strings connecting photographs and documents. She doesn’t want to be one of those strings anymore. She doesn’t want to be unsolved or unknown or untouched, she wants to be pinning him to the mattress and removing all traces of doubt from his mind that she’s really here.

It’s with that that she tosses their shirts aside, nails dragging along his chest as she runs her hand over the skin, kicking her heels off all the while. The difference in their heights is startling for a moment, until she remembers it’s always been this way and she just wear heels so regularly that she hasn’t had the chance to notice it recently.

His hands are fumbling at the waistline of her skirt, trying to find the elusive zipper that has somehow snuck around to a strange quarter turn behind her hip. He smirks into her mouth, victorious while he tugs it down so impatiently that for a moment they both think it’s going to rip down the middle. It’s her favorite skirt, but Lydia really can’t find it in herself to care. It doesn’t rip, but it’s a close thing, and when it glides down gently until it can drop off Stiles doesn’t waste any time in letting gravity do the rest of the work.

“Fucking hell, Lydia,” Stiles swears at her, voice low and reverent as he takes in the sight of her. She’s only covered from him by a lacy black bra and a tiny matching thong. “I think I found religion.”

That’s flattering to hear from anyone, but Lydia is fairly sure it means more coming from someone who has fought witches and werewolves and pixies (oh my!). It’s a struggle to stop herself from blurting out the ‘thanks’ that comes to mind that she would say to any guy, but Stiles isn’t any guy.

Looking up at him carefully through lowered lashed, she pushes her lower lip out by the most inconsequential of degrees and says, “Why don’t I teach you how to pray, then?”

Putting aside her initial thought proves to be more than worth it, judging by the way that Stiles plants his hands on her hips and backs them steadily into the wall, leaning down to suck her bottom lip into his mouth with a harshness she didn’t know he had. She scrambles for purchase against him, leaning against the wall and hitching up a thigh to his own, shivering at the rough fabric of his jeans against her skin.

“You can teach me anything you want.” Adjusting so that his hands are closer under her ass instead of just on her hips, he allows for her to rest more of her weight on him. “I could use a lesson or two.”

Lydia lowers her head against the wall and stutters out a laugh, because she’s not used to being breathless before even getting started. Then, using her hands on his shoulders as leverage, she hoists herself up a little so that he’s left holding her against the wall with her legs around his waist. With a hand tangled in his hair, she brings his face a little closer to her own before closing the gap between their lips again.

With his warm body covering her own, the rough pads of his fingers digging into her ass in a way that’s not quite comfortable but she kind of likes despite it, it’s not long before she’s dizzy with want and grinding against his hardening length, careful to make sure that her scrap of underwear doesn’t catch on the front of his jeans.

“Fuck, Stiles,” she moans, tightening her legs around him like a vice when he pushes them just a bit harder against the wall. It’s the most delicious sort of pressure, especially with him between her legs, and she’s fast considering the pros and cons of wall sex when there’s a bed only a few feet away.

He chuckles darkly, pulling off from where he’d been sucking a mark into her skin, a place deep enough she’d be able to cover it without a problem. “Now, or later?” he asks, because he’s an ass like that.

The meaning of his words almost catches her off-guard, but as soon as she realizes, she realigns her world and gives him a tight smile. Now would be preferable, really, because as hot as all of this is, this is the boy she’s been in love with for years. She wants the first time she falls apart around him to literally be around him, locking eyes with him all the while. “You have thirty seconds to get your pants off, and don’t let me touch the ground.”

To any other guy, it would be a task of trying to keep her up while also working at the denim, but Stiles is far more creative than that. She approves. He glances around quickly, coming to a decision before long. Shifting them about a foot further down the wall, he keeps her perched on the very edge of his desk while one hand shoves items further over so that they won’t fall off. A few fall off in the process, but he doesn’t pay any attention, just drops her onto the desk and takes a moment to kick his shoes and socks off, quickly followed by his jeans.

“Voila,” he declares, standing proudly before her clad only in dark purple boxers.

He’s still thin, but Lydia always suspected that his muscle mass would have been enough to keep him toned. It turns out that she’s more than right, finding it hard to decide whether his lower abdominal muscles or the wiry hairs that trail down below them are more distracting. He’s tall and thin, but he’s not skinny, and while she’s objective enough to know that to some people he would only be adequate, to her he’s perfect.

Her jaw hasn’t dropped, but it’s a close thing all the same. She’s sure that she’s staring at him with complete tenderness. She makes a grab for his hips, yanking him over before he can get the message and come back. “Thirty four seconds,” she says, because every other thought weighs too heavy on her tongue for her to be able to say.

“I’ll show you thirty four seconds,” he taunts her, eyebrows waggling suggestively all the while.

Taking a moment to pull away so that he’ll be able to see her frown disapprovingly at him, she informs him, “This had better last a hell of a lot longer than thirty four seconds.”

With a groan, he cups her jaw and smiles down at her. “I’ll see what I can do about that, then.” Kissing her while reaching around to unhook her bra doesn’t turn out to be more tasks than he can handle, but his concentration is evident in that every flick of his tongue is accompanied by a gentle touch of his fingers on her back. When that’s finally taken care of, Lydia removes her arms from his hips in order to get the rest of it off faster.

His fingers, having finished their mission with her bra, trail down to reach the soft edges of her underwear, tapping against her skin expectantly. She adjusts quickly, message received, putting a hand against the desk to brace herself against while she lifts her hips and allows him to get rid of the offending material keeping her from him.

That done, he pulls her to the edge of the desk and waits for her to hook her legs around him again. “Bed? Ladies choice,” he comments, clearly ready to lift her up and move her to the area in question should she say the word.

Normally, with any other guy, she’d say of course. But because it’s Stiles, because he asked in the same voice that he asked her about the bedroom in, as though there are plenty of options and it’s up to her to choose, because of that she snakes a hand on his chest and says, “Here.” Her voice is higher than normal, betraying her to her arousal.

He knows, if the look in his eyes in anything to go by, and it’s with a crooked grin that he motions for her to loosen up her legs, kneeling in front of her before she has the time to catch on to his intentions. Hooking her knees over his shoulders, he only waits for one of her hands to tangle in his hair, granting permission, before he’s parting her thighs nimbly with one hand and placing his mouth onto her wet heat.

“Holy Jesus,” Lydia swears, tilting her head back when he makes contact. And of course she’d wondered about Stiles’s mouth, about how he’d be able to use it like this, because it was obvious the boy had an oral fixation, but enjoying something and being good at something are two very different things. Two different things, both of which Stiles turns out to be very good at. Not that she’d thought he wouldn’t be, but it’s always nice to be surprised.

Licking over her, his nose somehow finds the perfect place to bump into her clit when he shifts slightly to make room for his wandering fingers. It’s when he slips one finger into her, his tongue not far behind, that he has to use his hand on her hip to hold her down when she nearly jumps in surprise.

She raises her head and stares down at him in wonder, knowing that she must looks like a mess, desperate and wanting for his touch. What she doesn’t expect is to notice how the hand that wasn’t on her hip, the one that was holding one of her knees to his shoulder, has disappeared. And by the noises she can hear him making from below her, she’s got one good guess as to where it’s gone.

The thought of Stiles getting off on getting her off is heady, something that has her moaning louder in seconds. Or maybe it’s the second finger he adds, but really she’s not sure. “I’m close,” she admits, and she usually wouldn’t be at this point, but she needs him to know so he can come up for air and fuck her properly.

Thrusting his fingers into her faster, he only stops when she tugs hard enough on his hair to distract him.

“Get up here,” Lydia snaps, breathing heavily and opening her legs to fall off of his shoulder and make room for him. “Why the fuck are you still wearing clothes?” she grumbles, having forgotten that his boxers were still on.

He laughs, standing quickly and ridding himself of the offending material. “Because _someone_ thought it was more important for you to be naked, it would seem.” Turning away, he takes a moment to scramble over to his nightstand and liberate a condom from the box in the drawer, waving it at her with a lecherous grin.

She stares at him, taking him in with a slow smile. “I seem to remember that someone being you, as it happens.” Because she’d asked him to take his jeans off, and while he’d complied he’d gotten her completely undressed right after. Not that she’s complaining, really, but the point still stands.

“Well, yeah,” he says, stepping back into her and trailing a hand over her breasts, kneading it gently and starting to suck a mark into her skin. This one is about collar-level, and she can already tell that she’ll need concealer in the morning, probably the expensive kind that she’s probably running out of judging by her luck. Despite that, she can’t bring herself to mind too much, especially when he scrapes a blunt nail over her nipple.

The heat in her stomach, already tightly coiled thanks to his talented mouth, gets tighter as he sucks at her skin. Running her hands over his sides and settling on the backs of his shoulders, she moves one down and takes the condom from him, ripping it with only a few problems. That taken care of, she moves down and pinches the tip, rolling it on him with a grateful thought that he has the already lubricated kind.

Shuddering, Stiles returns to her lips, using one hand to position himself at her entrance. “Fuck, you’re so good,” he moans, licking into her mouth as she pulses around him.

It’s not his best dirty talk by a long shot, but it still gets Lydia moaning, that or the slow lingering thrusts that he’s giving to her. Either way, really. “Jesus Christ, I love you,” she garbles, the words coming out just this side of coherent, and she doesn’t do confessions of love in the middle of sex, but she does love him. She loves him, and he knows, and she’s not going to avoid saying it just because they’re having fantastic sex that makes her toes curl.

“God, yes, I love you, too,” he says, apparently have understood despite how her words came out distorted into his skin. “Of course I love you, can’t believe how fucking long it took you, could have had this ages ago, fuck, we could have been doing this in high school,” he tells her, interspersing cursing all the while.

She meets him thrust for thrust, digging her nails into his shoulders as he speeds up. “Should have knocked on my door instead of called Scott. The night before I left,” she pants, breathing hard as she feels his critical gaze on her.

“You knew,” he states, everything else going unspoken. “You fucking knew, you saw me that night,” he says, unable to comprehend as he takes it in, pushing into her harder. “Saw me and didn’t fucking do anything about it, probably scared to death that I actually would go up and call you, ask if you were awake. Terrified.”

At a particularly forceful thrust, her arms on his shoulders prove to not be the best method of holding herself up, as she slips back and knocks her head against the wall. “Fuck, Jesus,” she says, one hand going to feel the injured area.

“Shit,” Stiles curses, stopping and tangling his hand in hers, kissing the area gently. “I’m sorry, so sorry, I’m an asshole,” he whispers soothingly to her, trying to figure out how badly it must hurt.

Annoyed, she glances over to him through narrowed eyes and shakes her hand out. With a hiss, she tells him, “Keep going.”

“Are you hurt?” he asks, not following her instructions even as she tightens her legs around him.

“Keep going,” she snaps, voice cracking despite the rigid look on her face, moving that hand to the desk to brace herself against and digging her nails deep into his shoulder.

And then he’s helpless but to do what she’s asked, making sure to be gentler this time, but still chasing that feeling he had only moments before. It isn’t long before they’re back to a rhythm that works, her hips rocking against his and driving him crazy in the way that only she can. Since she’s holding a hand behind her, he uses the leverage to lean down and place his mouth over her breast, sucking gently. Lydia is breathing hard in a way that has nothing to do with her recent injury, breath hitching every time he slides back into her.

Only barely restraining herself from crying out, she comes undone around him, biting her lip even as she whines. It’s only when he moves his lips back to hers that she vocalizes her need, the sound coming out pitiful and needy. Stiles seems to know what she needs, though, listening closely as he speeds up a minute amount, his moans getting lost in her mouth.

When he finishes, moments later, Stiles rests his head on her shoulder while ties the condom off and drops it in the trashcan nearby. “Holy fuck,” he enunciates, the syllables coming out shell-shocked and crystal clear, which is coincidentally the way that Lydia feels about the whole thing.

Propping herself on her elbows, she looks at the ceiling. “I know what you mean.”

The popcorn ceiling is painted the same white as the ceiling above her own bedroom in the empty Martin mansion is, which shouldn’t be that startling. Plenty of people have white ceilings, she’s been with plenty of guys and noticed that they had white popcorn ceiling before, this shouldn’t be any different. Only it is, because this is the room that Stiles grew up in. This is the room that they solved mysteries in, that they saved their friends in.

It feels right, to be back here, to get her breathing under control while she imagines all the nights they might have been able to spend here together before this. Her own bedroom would have seemed so foreign, it wouldn’t have felt like they have the history that they do. It would have felt like a new beginning, and it’s not.

It’s not a new beginning, because their beginning was so long ago that she can barely remember it. It’s just a continuation of the story, the story that’s been going on for so long.

“Come on,” he whispers into her neck, tugging at one of her hands gently until he’s pulling her onto the bed with him, the covers welcoming them wonderfully. Resting his chin again at her shoulder, he kisses up her jawline and over her cheeks, until finally coming to press their lips together in the lightest of touches.

She wouldn’t even call it a kiss, because it’s so innocent. Pulling away, she dares to ask, “Do you want to talk about it? That night. You didn’t know, I’m sorry, I should have called you, or done something.”

Staring into her green eyes, he lifts her hand and kisses it gently. “Of course I want to talk about it. But we can talk about that whenever. You’re leaving tomorrow, and you’re here for now. I just want to be here with you.”

It’s the perfect answer, and she’s almost overwhelmed with how perfect he is, how much she doesn’t deserve him after being the colossal bitch that she was to him for so long. Tears spring to her eyes, and she curls up in his arms, thinking about how things would have changed if she’d only called him that night, if she’d only called him back any other night. “I’m sorry, so sorry,” she whispers, her voice small.

Stiles lifts her chin until she’s meeting his gaze, and then he kisses her, hard and fast. “I love you. So much, I love you so much. And you wouldn’t let me walk away from this, because you knew better. I screamed at you, I said terrible things to you, and you stood there and told me how much you loved me. Proved it by how you didn’t give up, how you stood your ground. Don’t be sorry for anything you can’t change.”

Her stomach is still tangled in knots, but with his words Lydia draws nearer to him and closes her eyes. In the morning, Scott will be waiting for her out front, but until then she’ll stay where she belongs, tucked into Stiles’s side where it feels easier to breathe than anywhere else in the world.

-x-

_One unheard message._

Stiles sees the voicemail when he gets back from the restroom. He and Scott are doing a late lunch since the traffic Scott ran into getting back from Las Angeles was an absolute bitch. He leaves his phone sitting on the table, and when he gets back the screen is lit up with the notification.

Scott is staring at him with a smile as crooked as his jaw, and the arched eyebrow with that creates a look so smug that Stiles kind of wants to shake it off him. He says something, the likes of which Stiles doesn’t hear, too busy looking at his phone to make sure the notification is real. One missed call from Lydia Martin. One new voicemail.

Unlocking his phone quickly, he calls voicemail and punches in his password before it can ask him to. He needs to know, needs to listen. Putting it off would only stress him out. His heart is caught in his throat, and he can hear his pulse, which is ridiculous. If it sounds that loud to him, he vaguely wonders how loud it must be from where Scott’s sitting, especially with those nifty little enhanced werewolf senses.

“Hi,” Lydia starts, voice unsure before she powers through it. “Um, I just got back. Haven’t left the airport, yet, but I wanted to let you know that the flight went fine, I got back safely. And, uh, I’m really glad I got to see you. Really glad,” she says, the smile evident in her voice as she laughs a little under her breath. “I love you, Stiles.”

And with that, she’s gone, leaving him blindsided and smiling.

Scott smirks at him, repeating what he said earlier that Stiles still didn’t hear. When Stiles still doesn’t answer, he rolls his eyes and snaps his fingers in front of his best friend’s face. “You can’t even pretend to listen to me?” he asks, smiling nonetheless. “I’m not repeating the question, come on, give me an answer.”

Groaning, Stiles sets his phone down and tries to figure out what Scott would have asked him. Typical Scott questions involve passing Cheetos, making plans for the next day, and whether he actually didn’t have homework or if he was lying. The first and third don’t make sense for the day, since they don’t’ have Cheetos and neither of them have classes to receive homework from. Going with that he was most comfortable with, Stiles says, “Yeah, I’m free tomorrow,” and crosses his fingers in hopes he’d gotten it right.

With a laugh, Scott tosses his napkin across the table and rolls his eyes. “You’re hopeless. You idiot, I asked how Lydia was. Her flight landed by now, right?” Smirking, he reaches for his burger and adds more barbeque sauce.

Sitting back against the booth, Stiles understands that Scott is basically the worst person ever. He’s the best person ever, too, of course, but still. “You heard the voicemail,” he accuses, eyes narrowed as he tries to figure out whether anything too incriminating was said.

Scott grins and hums to himself before shrugging. “I heard her voice, but I didn’t listen in. I figured I’d at least try to give you a little privacy. But, just so you’re not operating under any delusions, Lydia told me everything on the drive up. And I mean everything.”

“Everything?” Stiles asks, barely catching himself from pushing it out in a groan. He’s told Scott about his sexual encounters before, probably more than the other boy either needed or wanted to know, but they’d always over-shared. Even in high school before he had stories of his own to tell, he’d known far more about Allison’s hot spots and the way she liked it rough than anyone who wasn’t having sex with her had any right to.

Leveling him with a look, Scott smugly swirls one of his fries in too much ketchup and nods. “Everything.”

The only response that he can manage to that is a groan, because, really, there are some thing best friends shouldn’t know about each other. “Oh my God, how detailed was she?” 

Because he already knows how Lydia catalogues details perfunctorily and without regard for other people’s privacy, but he’s still holding out hope that she might have had the presence of mind to keep a few things to herself in this case.

Scott’s nose wrinkles momentarily, and he makes the kind of face that doesn’t seem like a good sign. “Dude, you fucked her on your desk while your bed was right there. Right there, man, I’ve been in your room, that’s like three feet away. You could have made it to the bed. All I’m saying, man, all I’m saying. Beds are comfortable.”

And that’s, well, that’s something Stiles probably would have told him anyway, holding out his hand for a high five afterward. Wearing a relieved grin and an expectant smile, he salvages the situation by raising his hand.

Immediately, Scott jerks back and shakes his head rapidly. “I know where that’s been, man.”

“You’ve high fived me after sex before, come on, what’s so different about now?” Stiles demands.

“Well, first off, I actually know Lydia, and I’m not about to congratulate you on the sex you just had with my friend. Kind of weird, actually, really weird. Second, and more importantly in this case, I can still smell her on you, which, okay, I’ve gotten more used to the fact that I can smell sex than I ever thought I would, but it’s still not cool. Specifically, however, I can smell her on your hand. Have you not even washed your hands today?”

He thinks it over, knows that he’s washed his hands at least twice today. Probably three times, but definitely twice. “I have totally washed my hands today, I’m not disgusting. And why would you let me steal a fry off your plate when my hands still smell like her?” It’s not an unwarranted question, okay? Stiles has genuine concerns.

Scott assumes an expression that is both horrified and constipated. “Oh my God, please take the rest of my fries and we’ll never talk about this again. And if you never tell anyone this, I won’t tell anyone about how Lydia hit her head and you fucked her through it.”

Head in his hands and a growing blush on his cheeks, Stiles resolves that, when he calls her back, he should ask Lydia to perhaps not be so explicit with Scott about the sex they’d had or the sex they’re going to have. He smiles a little, glad that Scott can’t see his face. When he calls her back. He likes the sound of that.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm helpless-in-sleep on tumblr, please come by to bug me about Teen Wolf. I'll be more than happy to procrastinate whatever school work I should be doing to talk about that instead!


End file.
